Marie Antoinette (part two): Teenage Drama Queen

Vulgar History Podcast

Marie Antoinette (part two): Teenage Drama Queen

September 17, 2025

Ann Foster:
Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and this is Marie Antoinette Month, and we’re in the midst of telling the story of Marie Antoinette herself. Over the past few weeks, we’ve talked about some of her friends, we’ve talked about her mom. Last week, we got into the story of our girl herself. And today we’re going to be continuing that Marie Antoinette, part two. 

My references for this episode, and I recommend each and every one of these books if you want to dig more into it, because there’s only so much I can say in a podcast format. So, In the Shadow of the Empress: The Defiant Lives of Maria Theresa, Mother of Marie Antoinette and Her Daughters, that’s all the title, by Nancy Goldstone. As well as the urtext, everyone agrees this is kind of the Marie Antoinette biography to get the overarching story of her life itself in a sympathetic way, Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser. I also consulted Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution by Caroline Weber, as well as Marie Antoinette: Teen Queen to Guillotine by Melanie Burrows, that’s a book that’s coming out, I think, in October next month. I was fortunate enough to get an early copy of it, and I really appreciated being able to consult all these books and to crunch all the information together to try and make it into a chronological story for me to share with all of you. 

So, because it’s been a minute for some of you, a week, since we had our last Marie Antoinette episode… Previously on, here’s what you missed on Vulgar History, Marie Antoinette. So, Marie Antoinette, age 14, left behind her entire Austrian identity to move to Versailles to marry the Dauphin of France, whose name was Louis-Auguste. He was the Duke of Berry, people called him Berry, and I’m going to continue to call him Berry just to tell him apart from all the other people called Louis in this story. She did not realize when she arrived in Versailles that almost everybody there hated her and that it was this, kind of, cult without a leader since the king was just checked out and playing golf all the time. Hateration Nation comprised a lot of people who she met and who she thought she should have been able to trust, like her aunts, like her husband’s brothers, like her husband’s cousin, like the ladies-in-waiting. Kind of, everyone hated her before they even met her because they hated the idea of her because she was Austrian and a lot of people in France didn’t trust Austria, and also because a lot of people were worried that the power that they had, being sort of tangentially close to the king, would maybe be threatened by her because maybe she would become close to the king. None of this was her fault. And she didn’t realize, at first, how many people hated her and were pulling mean tricks on her. 

And then, they got married; she was 14, Berry was 15. They didn’t know how sex works. We’ll talk about that in this episode some more. They have still not, at the point that we’re in in this episode, four years into their marriage, consummated their marriage because they don’t know how sex works. Marie Antoinette worked out her frustration at all of this—being surrounded by haters, at having nobody she can trust, at feeling like a failure at what she had been sent there to do, which was to have children by this person—she learned how to horseback ride, she started wearing pants. She kind of had the idea that if she couldn’t get power by being the mother of the future king of France, she would get power by just kind of cosplaying as Louis XIV, the previous, much beloved king of France. 

Meanwhile, she and Berry got to visit Paris for the first time. And just like in so many shows, Sex and the City, Emily in Paris, The Hills, The Summer I Turned Pretty, like Paris is the place for a young woman to go to really find herself. She loved it there, and everyone there loved her at this point. So, even though the bitches at Versailles were comprised, Hateration Nation, the common people in Paris were, like, really excited to see her and to see Berry, including even the Market Ladies, presented her a bouquet of produce. Marie Antoinette was like, “Wow! This is great, they’ll like me personally as a person.” That’s not true. She didn’t know that yet, but you know, bless her heart. She’s young and we have retrospect now, but people were just really excited to see new, hot, young royals because everyone hated the king so much. So, again, the same way that Hateration Nation hated Marie Antoinette because of what she represented, the people of Paris loved her because of what she represented. None of this was about who she really was or what she actually represented. 

We ended our episode last time with the death of Golf King, Louis XV. Marie Antoinette and Berry sobbing on the floor, praying, saying, “We’re too young. We can’t be king and queen.” That’s where we left off, and I’m going to backtrack a little bit so we can appreciate more about the context in which Marie Antoinette became Queen of France. To do so, we need to talk a bit about Berry’s cousin, Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, who we mentioned last time, and he’s becoming a main player. So, on this podcast, that means he gets a cute nickname. So, his name is Philippe and we’re going to call him Ryan Phillippe, which people, millennials will know as Reese Witherspoon’s ex-husband and co-star in the movie Cruel Intentions. And that’s how you pronounce his name. It looks like it’s pronounced Ryan [phonetic] fil-eep, but it’s pronounced Ryan [ph.] fil-ip-ee. And our Ryan Phillippe, honestly, just picture Ryan Phillippe from Cruel Intentions because that’s kind of the vibe; he’s a womanizer, he’s a fuck boy. We mentioned him before; he was pals with the Princess de Lamballe’s husband, they used to like to go to orgies together and stuff. 

So, Ryan Phillippe was part of the French royal family. So, there was Louis XIV, who was the Sun King, he was the one who invented Versailles. He had a brother called also Ryan Phillippe. And so, our Ryan Phillippe is the descendant of Louis XIV’s brother, so he’s a cousin to the French royal family, which makes him called a Prince of the Blood. What this also meant is that in terms of the line of succession, Berry is going to become king, Louis XVI. Next in the line of succession after Berry would be his next younger brother, Provence. After that is his next younger brother, Artois. And after that, assuming none of those guys have sons, Ryan Phillippe would be the next king. And so, his whole branch of the family, the whole Ryan Phillippe family, was just mad because they felt like they should be king, they should be further ahead in line of succession, his whole family, like his dad. 

They all hated Louis XV, the Golf King, because of his autocratic ways. They thought that “We would be like the chill, cool kings. We should be the king instead of him, we don’t like how he just does what he wants without seeing other people’s ideas, like our ideas.” And so, because the whole family hated the Golf King, they stayed away from Versailles a lot of the time, and they started their own sort of like, rival fake Versailles, a kind of Lafufu Versailles, in Paris, which is called the Palais Royale. And this was, like Versailles is not just one building, it’s a whole bunch of buildings, it’s like a compound, the Palais Royale is kind of a big mall area. There’s a place where they live, and they host events there, but also, there’s like a marketplace, and there’s a street, and there’s shops and cafes, and it’s all in the Champs-Élysées, and anybody can go there anytime. Which also, anybody could go to Versailles anytime, it was strangely open to the public constantly, but the Palais Royale was open to the public and in Paris, so more people would kind of go there. 

So, the Ryan Phillippe family had, sort of, liberal-adjacent politics in the sense of, you know, they didn’t support Louis XV being this kind of tyrant autocrat, is how they saw him, and he kind of was before he just fucked off to just play golf all the time. The Ryan Phillippe family was like, “We’ll be cool kings, we’ll be kind of liberal kings. We’ll be the king for the common man,” is kind of their vibe, even though they are also aristocrats and, you know, dressing up fancy and whatever. And so, the people in Paris liked them because they could hang out in their mall and because these guys are kind of cosplaying as being, like, real working-class type guys. 

So yeah, anyone could go to their mall, the Palais Royale, and just hang out, like wander around the gardens, visit the shops, there’s cafes, there’s gambling spots, bookstores. There was also a popular place for sex workers to hang out there, and the Paris Opera was also there. The Paris Opera is a place where very rich, influential people would go. So, the Palais Royale is like, anyone can hang out there of any kind of class, really. It was sort of a place where the high-born people and the low-born people were all kind of in the same place at the same time, which is kind of unusual for France at this time. 

So, Ryan Phillippe, remember, fuckboy of the world, he had a wife, because everyone in this story is married, even though they’re fucking other people. His wife is named Louise. And so, Louise, we’ve kind of talked about before in the Princess de Lamballe episode, because Louise is the sister of Princess of Lamballe’s dead fuckboy husband. So, Louise is sister-in-laws with Princess Lamballe. And if you recall, the Prince of Lamballe, the dead fuckboy husband, his family was super rich, and when he died, Princess of Lamballe, his widow, who was 19 or something, became the wealthiest woman in all of France with this cool father-in-law who supported her, always. Louise also inherited a lot of money, so that’s part of the reason why Ryan Phillippe married her. 

So, he neglected his wife, obviously, because he sucks, and Louise is just like, “Well, what’s a girl to do? Well, I’m here in the Ryan Phillippe mall area, and I’m just going to go hang out in the shop. So, I’m going to go try on some dresses and just, like, become a fashion girly,” which is what she did. So, in the Palais Royale, there’s fashion stores, and there’s also nearby Rue Saint-Honoré, there’s also lots of boutiques you can go to, to get your, like, literal couture, that’s where it’s invented. And so, she, Louise, was like, “I’m super rich. I have nothing to do. So, I’m just going to get really into fashion.” She was considered the most stylish woman of the era. And while shopping, one day, Louise is just, like, checking out the shops, and she found a shop called the Grand Mogol, named after, kind of, Asia because Asian influence was trendy at this time. The Grand Mogol is owned by a fashion designer/entrepreneur named Rose Bertin, who made the most amazing outfits. Louise was just like, “I’ve never seen outfits this good. I’m going to wear these outfits. Rose Bertin, look at what you’re doing.” 

She’s like, it’s hard to say… I don’t know who’s like a real fashion designer who’s a celebrity right now. It feels like fashion stylists are kind of more celebrities than fashion designers. But Rose Bertin is just like, her store, she will make you a dress to your specifications, like, you choose your fabric, you choose your design, and she will do it up, but her store also sells other stuff, like hats and ribbons and accessories and stuff. So, she’s kind of like, it’s all in one, all in the shop. I draw from this well a lot, but I feel like the most well-known fashion consultant advisor person these days is Law Roach, who works with Zendaya for her outfits. It’s at that level. Rose Bertin is just like, she’s got fingers on the pulse, she knows what’s going to be cool before it’s cool, she’s making trends, she’s setting trends, and Louise is like her muse at this point. So, we’ll talk a bit about Rose Bertin because she’s going to be another important character in this whole story. 

At this point, what are we in, 1774? So, Rose Bertin is like in her early twenties. She’s an up-and-coming young Gen Z. She’s from Picardy, and she’s not noble or royal or aristocratic at all; she’s just like a girl with a thimble and a dream. And so, at the time, in Paris, I think in all of France, the law said that the only people who could set up fashion stores and make clothes were men who were members of this, like, guild of sewers and the wives of those men. And Rose Bertin, unmarried, not a man, is just like, “Well, you know what? I’m just going to do this and fuck that law.” And her store was so good, everyone’s like, “That’s cool, you can stay. We’ll allow this.” 

So, her shop again, the Grand Mogol, sold kind of everything. Her store was really successful because she had such a good eye for choosing fabric. She had really good suppliers. The dresses and the hats and everything were so just, like… Her aesthetic is like Lady Gaga mixed with Chappell Roan. It’s like extravaganza, maximalist, just like, eye-catching, cutting edge. At first, when you see some of the stuff, you’re like, “Well, that’s weird!” But then you’re like, “But it’s also beautiful.” So, she just had this great eye for everything. So, the store was really big, it was like, how we’d probably imagine, like, a department store or something today, and she would just lay back on this, like, chaise lounge and just be like, “You should try that dress on. You should try that dress on.” And everyone’s like, “Okay. Because you get it.” Like, she set the aesthetic just as this young woman from Picardy. 

So, she’s setting these trends, and when I personally, before I started researching the series, when I thought about Marie Antoinette, I would picture her kind of like the big bouffant hair, the really big, like, sideways-y hoop skirt. That’s kind of the aesthetic that I imagine most with Marie Antoinette, and Rose Bertin is a person who kind of invented or popularized that aesthetic, specifically the pouf. So, the pouf. If you watched Bridgerton on Netflix, and you know the kind of hairstyles that Queen Charlotte would wear in Bridgerton, which is like, huuuuge, huge wigs with, like, moving carousel horses in them and stuff. That’s the pouf, this is what we’re working with here. 

So, the pouf was initially developed by Rose Bertin and her hairdresser bestie, Monsieur Léonard, who we’re just going to call Leo, also main character in this. And he’s like, the most famous hairstylist I know of is like Chris Appleton, who does the hair for like Jennifer Aniston and people. So, Leo and Rose are just, like, they’re the it, glam squad of the era. Together, their powers combined to create the pouf hairstyle/fashion moment. 

Initially, the poufs were created for actresses because Rose and Leo, they have lots of different customers of all different classes because they’re in this mall, the Palais Royale. Like, rich people came and poor people came and, like, noble people came; some of the noble people were poor, and some of the lower-class people were rich, and actresses really needed to… Actresses at this time were sort of actresses/sex workers. It was kind of understood that that’s sort of what the job was, and they wanted to stand out both as actresses, like, to get cast for roles, but also to attract the attention of maybe sugar daddies. And Leo was also designing hairstyles for, like, plays and stuff. So, they were just like, “Let’s do something dramatic. What can we do vis-à-vis hair?” So, they initially created these pouf hairstyles as a way for actresses to kind of stand out. And the noble women, because it’s like, again, in this mall, you’ve got the rich and the poor and everyone’s hanging out together, and they saw these actresses, they’re like, “That looks fucking rad. I want one of those poufs.” And they’re like, “Oh, I got it at Rose Bertin’s Grand Mogol shop.” 

So, a pouf. To describe it, it’s a huge wig that is built on, like, it’s so huge—again, think about Queen Charlotte and Bridgerton on Netflix—you need wire scaffolding. Some of the poufs are, like, three feet tall, they’re massive construction things, and you sort of tease the person’s hair around it a bit and like powder their hair, but there’s also, like, wig hair on it, and also just these structures. So, you’ve got this scaffolding holding up this huge thing. And it’s not just like, “Oh, here’s my hair, it’s big.” It’s like they would use it to make sort of like, artistic tableaus that sort of advertise, like a billboard, something that person wanted people to know about them. 

For instance, Louise Phillippe finds out about the pouf, and she’s just like, she’s the fashion girly, she’s the Hailey Bieber of this era, she’s just trend-setting. And she is like, “This pouf is it. This is a way that I can communicate the things I want to say in an artistic style and look rad as hell.” So, when she gave birth to one of her sons, she commissioned, she worked with Rose and Leo to get this pouf that was, like, a birth announcement pouf. And this pouf, this giant wig thing, it featured on it, carved out of, I don’t know if these are like figurines made of ceramic, or if it’s carved out of actual hair. But the things in her pouf included her parrot, the image, like, a little, tiny statue of a nursemaid seated in an armchair, the armchair also in the pouf. The nursemaid is clasping a newborn baby to her breast, and also, Louise Phillippe’s African servant was part of it. So, it’s just like a painting, but on your head, and it’s not a painting, it’s a three-dimensional object. She’s just like, “Look, I had a baby. See?” It’s her walking Instagram. 

Marie Antoinette is spending more and more time in Paris, but she also knows Louise Phillippe, like that’s kind of part of the young, cool crowd of people that she spends time with sometimes, and she saw Louise Phillippe’s pouf and she’s just like, “What the fuck? I need one of those. What is this? Who made you this pouf?” And so, Louise Phillippe was responsible for bringing Rose Bertin to Versailles and introducing her to Marie Antoinette. And these two, it’s Zendaya and Law Roach. It’s just like, it’s a beautiful relationship where they just creatively, artistically, just vibes-based. Like, they just like… This is it. These two are going to work together really well. And Marie Antoinette was just like, “I’m all in on the pouf. I love it. Let’s have a pouf moment, I’m in my pouf era.” So, she just got right into it. 

We’re getting caught up to where we ended last week’s episode, which was the death of Golf King, Louis XV. Marie Antoinette commissioned a mourning pouf, so it’s a giant, you know, three-foot-tall wig structure covered in, like, black velvet ribbons that are used for mourning officially, trimmed with a black veil and topped with a crescent moon. This is a way that Marie Antoinette… It’s like, when there’s official mourning at Versailles, everyone has to wear black, and there’s, of course, specific rules about it because everything at Versailles has specific rules, but she’s like, “I’m following the rules and also I look fabulous as fuck and I’m the queen and I’m in mourning.” 

And if you’ll recall, what Golf King Louis XV died of was smallpox, a strong supporting character in this series of episodes as well. You may also, I’ll remind you, that a whole lot of people in Marie Antoinette’s family had died of smallpox, all in a row, and/or gotten smallpox, and/or gotten disfigured by smallpox, and/or just their health suffered by smallpox. Like, her mother was suffering from, like, long smallpox; her sister Elizabeth’s face was disfigured to the point that she couldn’t even arrange a marriage anymore; one of her sisters died of it; two of her sister-in-laws died of it. Marie Antoinette was just like, “Fuck smallpox.” In Austria, where Marie Antoinette is from, there was the whole inoculation thing, which, if you want to get a deep dive in that, I did an episode back in 2020 when I was doing some pandemic specials about how the concept of inoculation spread throughout Western Europe, and it came from the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire who had some women there who were from Eastern Europe, and they had figured out this thing called variolation, which is, someone has smallpox, and you would just take some pus from one of their sores, and you would scratch a person who doesn’t have smallpox and put the pus in that person. And then, it’s sort of like, by exposing them to a controlled small amount of smallpox, it made them immune to smallpox, usually. 

There’s also a thing called… I don’t know if it’s all called inoculation or variolation, but coming out of the UK, there was the concept, Edward Jenner was the person who popularized it, where milkmaids were found who spent a lot of time with cows, cows got a disease called cowpox, which is similar to smallpox, and the milkmaids never got smallpox. So, Edward Jenner was like, “Oh! So, if we expose people… Instead of scratching them and putting in smallpox, if we expose them to cowpox, maybe they’ll be…” This is what’s happening, and this is the backbone and foundation of today’s vaccination. 

Anyway, Marie Antoinette was just like, “Oh my gosh, smallpox.” The king died of smallpox, everybody in Versailles had to flee because they didn’t want to all get smallpox and potentially die or get disfigured. And Marie Antoinette is just like, “You guys, why don’t we just get inoculated like we do in Austria?” She herself had had smallpox, I think when she was a young girl, so she was basically immune. Her husband, Berry, was not immune, and so Marie Antoinette is just like, “Can we just get you inoculated, please?” And this was Hater Nation, the people who hated her and Austrians, were just like, “Oh no, the king. Please don’t do this, Berry. She’s an evil Austrian whore. This is going to kill you with some sort of poison.” But this disease had just killed his father and made him be the king, and Marie Antoinette is just like, “How about we make you be immune to this horrific disease?” And Berry’s like, “Okay, I’ll do it.” And so, he did get inoculated, and he survived, and Marie Antoinette could be like, “Told you so. This is a safe thing to do.” 

How did she celebrate her triumph at being right and convincing her husband, the king, to get inoculated? With a pouf! Le pouf de l’inoculation, the inoculation pouf. So, this is like, a huge scaffolding structure wig that features all the emblems of inoculation, which included “a serpent, which is associated with the Greek god of medicine. The serpent on this pouf is twined around an olive tree. The olive tree represents wisdom. Behind the olive tree in the pouf, beams a great golden sun,” which is a nod to her and also to Berry’s ancestor, the joint ancestor, Louis XIV, the Sun King. So, this is kind of like a promise that the glory of the Sun King had returned to France through Marie Antoinette and Berry, and this new scientific thing, inoculation. 

So, pouf nation just took off. Once Marie Antoinette started wearing the pouf, then everybody was wearing the pouf in Versailles, but also in Paris. Like, it’s a nation all under one pouf. The poufs that other women were wearing, at this time, everyone’s excited. Even though Hater Nation is there doing their best to spread pamphlets and stuff against Marie Antoinette, most of the people, the cultural vibe in Paris is, “Oh, thank God, the Golf King is dead. We like Marie Antoinette and Berry. Let’s celebrate them.” This is the restoration of having good kings again, it’s just like Louis XIV. So, the poufs that women wore were to celebrate Marie Antoinette. So, they were designed to pay homage. For instance, a popular pouf theme that Rose Bertin was selling was a cornucopia, which is the big horn of plenty, like you have at Thanksgiving or at the Hunger Games. The cornucopia-shaped pouf symbolized the prosperous future that awaited France under the new king and queen. 

Marie Antoinette also won some more brownie points among people because when she became queen, there had been a tradition where the queen would usually be paid a certain financial gift, which would come from a tithe or a tax that the poor people of France, who were starving, would all have to pay to give her a gift of money. And she was just like, “It’s fine. I have money. You don’t need to give this to me.” And everyone’s like, “Oh, she’s so generous. We love her. She’s so great.” 

So, it took about a year from the time that they were named king and queen until there was actually the coronation. I assume that’s just partially because of, like, quarantining for smallpox and just because Golf King Louis XV died suddenly and unexpectedly, so it takes time to plan a big event like this. Think about planning a wedding; this is even more elaborate than that. So, June 1775, a little over the year, like, a year and a month after the death of Louis XVI, Berry is crowned in Reims Cathedral in Reims, which is a place about 145 kilometres outside of Paris. I just want to note that distance because this is the furthest Berry had ever been, anywhere. Like, he had spent time, almost all of his life, in Versailles. He went to Paris sometimes, and Reims, this is the furthest he’s ever been, the most he’s ever travelled. So, you know, there’s a big thing, it’s a big event, he’s wearing his cloak. And then there’s a big part of the ceremony where the crown of Charlemagne (who was like the OG King of France, kind of), this huge old gold crown, all the Princes of the Blood are there, Ryan Phillippe, all the guys, and they kind of make a circle sort of like in the end part of the Katseye Gap ad, they make a circle all around Berry, and then they jointly put this crown on his head because the crown is really heavy and one person can’t do it. And when the crown is put on his head, poor little Berry, if you recall, our neurodivergent king, was heard to say, “The crown is hurting me.” I’m sure it was, and also, psychologically. 

Meanwhile, you know, who has the neck strength to carry a huge thing on her head? Is Marie Antoinette, who was there on the scene. So, they built a special grandstand in Reims Cathedral just for her because this was the first consort to attend a coronation of a French king since 1547, that had been Catherine de’ Medici. That was because the last three kings had all been crowned when they were, like, little boys, and they didn’t have wives, and then they all ruled for a really long time, which is how you have only three kings between 1547 and 1775, I guess. Anyway, so it’s kind of like, up to her what she wanted to wear because there wasn’t really a protocol for this because the last time this happened was 1547. And you know our girl’s not going to wear a ceremonial garb. The second she became queen, she’s just like, “Fuck all y’all’s rules. I’m going to be me, watch me go.” So, she wore a Rose Bertin original creation. 

Her gown was covered in jewels, so many jewels. They made it so heavy that Rose Bertin had to give special instructions about how to carry this dress. Like, it was so heavy, you couldn’t just carry it, so she had to, like, design this special stretcher just to carry the dress. It was so extreme, so glittery, so jewely, and of course, Marie Antoinette’s hair was in a pouf, I’m sure it’s called the pouf à la coronation, topped with a cluster of white feathers. Some haters were like, “Oh, her pouf is so tall, we couldn’t even see the king. She blocked our view.” She did not, in fact, haters, do that, because she was up at the front. Nobody was behind her. So yeah, she’s queen. 

I want to put this in context that she became queen when she was 18 years old. At the time of the coronation, she’s now 19 years old. In previous episodes of this podcast, we talked about another monarch, Christina of Sweden, who was from a few hundred years earlier. Christina of Sweden did not like rules, did not like living the way that people wanted her to, and eventually, she ended up quitting and stopping being queen. When she, Christina of Sweden, ran off to just kind of like do her own thing, I called it in those episodes—which are from, I don’t know, 2021, 2022—her Bangerz era in reference to Miley Cyrus, who went from being, like, a Disney Hannah Montana starlet and the Bangerz era Miley is when she’s like twerking, cutting off her hair and stuff. At that time, it felt like a relevant comparison, but Miley Cyrus has been through so many eras since then. 

Just to put you in the mind of like what Marie Antoinette is up to here and her age and what she’s doing, I’m going to say this, she’s in her JoJo Siwa era, because like JoJo Siwa, Marie Antoinette is incredibly young, she’s 19 years old. She had sort of a happy childhood, but kind of neglected, and then she was sent to Versailles, age 14, and she had to kind of perform in this way that she wasn’t necessarily comfortable, that she didn’t want to. And now, she finally has some control over her life like JoJo Siwa when she went from being, like, the girl with a bow to being what she referred to, JoJo Siwa, as the first lesbian pop star. JoJo Siwa is going through some real personal discovery in a very public way that leads to some mockery from some people, and Marie Antoinette is that same age. She’s in her JoJo Siwa era, and she’s just like, “Who am I even? I haven’t had a chance to think about this, to develop my own identity, my own fashion sense. I just want to be a young woman, and like play around, and have a nice time, and figure out who I am really.” The thing here is that she’s also the queen of France, and there are broader repercussions for her doing this than there are for JoJo Siwa, who’s entering her tradwife era or whatever she’s up to at the moment. 

But Marie Antoinette, at this point, she hated all the weird Versailles rules; she hated how everybody hated her and was always trying to trick her. And now she’s like, “I’m the goddamn queen, I’m going to do what I want.” And Berry is like, “Hell yeah, girl, you are.” She would just be like, “Berry, I want to do this. Can I fire Madame Etiquette, this bitch who’s always been mean to me?” And Berry’s like, “Hell yeah!” And Marie Antoinette’s like, “Can we just exile Madame du Barry, the CEO of Hater Nation, who’s been against me this whole time and who I don’t like?” And Berry’s like, “Yeah, whatever you want, babe.” So, Marie Antoinette, they just have more control over things. These are the sorts of things that she wants to be in control of. Some people from Hater Nation are thinking, “Oh, Marie Antoinette, she’s this Austrian spy, she wants to take over the government.” And it’s like, no, what she wants to do is just party and have a good time. She’s in her Kesha era. She’s in, dare I say, tits out era. 

So, she loved Paris. Remember, she went there for that one time, and she liked it there. Now, she’s met Rose Bertin, she’s met Leo, she’s like, “I want to hang out where you are in the Ryan Phillippe mall. I want to see the open-air markets and go shopping and just, like, live my Emily in Paris fantasy.” So, she would go to Paris, like, two to three days a week, she wouldn’t stay there overnight. It was, I don’t know… What did I say? I don’t think I said, but it’s maybe a couple hour carriage ride, so she could go there in the morning and go back to Versailles to sleep there at night. And she just loved it! Who doesn’t? Like any 19-year-old in a self-discovery vibe, she’s just like, “This place is great.” So, she would browse the open-air markets, stroll along the Champs-Élysées, the river. She would have picnics with her besties. At this point, she’s got her girl gang; she’s got Gabrielle de Polignac there with her, she’s got Princess de Lamballe with her, and she’s just having a nice time with her girls. 

She would go to the Paris Opera a lot to see it because she loves music. Remember, from when she was a kid, she loves music, she loves supporting the arts. So, she’s seen there, like, applauding at the opera, and then they would also host balls at the opera, and she would go there in disguise. She would wear a mask and just, like, get down at the parties. And then eventually, when people figured out who she was, then she’d have to leave. But like people in Paris were like, “This is great! Look at this queen who’s here amongst us, having a nice time.” The same way that Ryan Phillippe and his family were sort of popular because they were, like, among the people, at this point, the people in Paris were just like, “This is rad. This is great! We like having the queen with us. She’s a cool queen. What a fun new era we are in.” Like, she went to see the opera, supporting the arts, and she also supporting the arts back in Versailles, where she still lived. She would host concerts there, and she would also have kind of little jam sessions in her apartments where she would invite her favourite musicians over to hang out with her. 

One of her favourite musicians is Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, who we did a whole episode about a few months ago. He is the Black fencer, composer, musician, later soldier, overall very impressive guy. Marie Antoinette was really into his music; he wrote this fun music. And so, she supported him, basically, by hiring him to do concerts and, like, hanging out with him in her rooms and stuff. And when the job of the Director of Paris Opera came open, there’s a job opening, Joseph Bologne was like, “Oooh, I would love to be… Like, this is such a highly cherished position, such an important position. I would like to be considered for this role.” But he had his own haters because of racism. So, a whole group of actresses wrote directly to Marie Antoinette, being like, “We can’t be actresses at the Paris Opera if the person in charge is a mixed-race Black man.” So, it was a whole scandal thing. We talk about this in my episode about Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, if you want to get more details on it. Effectively, he removed himself from consideration because he didn’t want to put Marie Antoinette in an awkward position. But he kept on playing music and other symphonies, and she continued to support him. 

Hater Nation is never not looking for something to complain about. And they were just like, “Oh my god, Marie Antoinette is spending time with this very handsome Black man.” And there’s a whole racist thing about Joseph Bologne and, like, was he a womanizer? He was friends with Ryan Phillippe and that kind of fuckboy crowds, but it’s just like, “Oh, Marie Antoinette is this…” Anytime she’s spending time in a room with any human being, someone’s like, “Oh my god, she’s fucking that person.” Man, woman, anyone. It’s just kind of like, Hater Nation just didn’t like to see her with anyone. The vibes are very much just like, “How dare Meghan Markle, Meghan Sussex, have a cooking show and invite on her makeup artist, Daniel Martin? What a disgrace to humanity this is.” But anyway, Joseph Bologne got all caught up in that as well. And Marie Antoinette is just kind of like, again, to paraphrase something that I’ve read that Meghan Sussex, has said, there’s a quote that she lives her life by. Actually, I think I heard this from Amanda Matta, who was a guest on the podcast a couple weeks ago. But it’s like, “You put praise and you put hatred, it all goes down the same drain.” Just like, you do you, babe. Just do what you’re going to do. “Hater’s going to hate, hate, hate, hate, hate,” that’s quoting someone else. She’s just going to shake it off, is what Marie Antoinette is up to, because she’s the god damn queen! And she’s just in her JoJo Siwa era. 

Again, I really want to emphasize how young this person is. She is, at this point, maybe 20 years old. Like, contemporarily, a 20-year-old in America, not allowed to legally drink alcohol, can’t rent a car. And she’s this little baby in charge of everything, just like, having a nice time. The vibes are, again with JoJo Siwa, but also any child star, I’m thinking about, like, Justin Bieber now, just somebody when you’re so young and you have access to so many resources to just, like, really engage with what interests you, with your hobbies, and everyone around you is just being like, “Yeah, girl! Yeah!” It’s hard to mature in a similar way to other people. She came to Versailles, age 14, and then she was kind of trapped, so by the time she becomes queen when she’s 18, I think she’s still psychologically maturity-wise, really similar to that 14-year-old girl. And she was a young 14-year-old girl, she played with dolls. So, now, she’s 19, 20 years old, queen of France, and she’s just like, “I just want to have fun. I just want to have fun again in my life.” 

She’s also, like, seemingly everybody in France and all of Western Europe in this time period, a huge fan of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau has come up quite a bit. If you listened to our episodes about French Revolution era, you’ll know I’m not a fan. His whole thing, Rousseau, is he was from a lower-class family, he did not get much formal education, and so he was kind of like, “We should not have class divisions. It should be a meritocracy where people like I, Rousseau, can have more opportunities than I have,” which is like, fair point, makes sense. And like, everybody should be treated the same, and there shouldn’t be any class divisions. And it’s like, okay, okay. And he’s like, “And also, we should all just be back to our traditional roots as human animals.” 

He read stuff like John Smith—who was from, not only a character in the Disney movie Pocahontas, but also real history—he was the colonizing guy who got all up in the business of the girl who we know is Pocahontas. Her real name was Matoaka, I did an episode about that a while ago. So, John Smith and people like him went to America and Canada and just were like, “Wow! Look at these Indigenous people,” and they misrepresented how they were living. And they’re like, “Look at how “simple” their lives are. We should be like that too; we should all just vibe with nature and, like, be among gardens and trees, and just everything should be like how it was.” But for him, part of that “simple” life was, like, women should stay home and just breastfeed babies all the time. This is kind of a huge deal that he said that women should breastfeed because at this time, like, rich people, women didn’t breastfeed because it was seen as like that’s a thing that peasants do, but also breastfeeding, as maybe you know, has some contraceptive properties, and this is a Catholic country and they wanted women to have lots of babies. Anyway, Rousseau’s whole thing, it’s like multifaceted, problematic in many ways. What Marie Antoinette took from it was like, “Let’s be in nature more,” and that’s a nice thing. 

So, she wanted to simplify her life. I think she was living— Like, Versailles was so restrictive to her; the clothing was so restrictive, and every day she had to do the same things, and she hated all of those things. And if you recall from her girlhood, like she’s an ADHD-coded girly; she likes variety, she likes excitement! She wants to just have a nice time and explore what life has to offer. So, she’s just all up in Rousseau at this point. She’s like super into Rousseau, she and her friends went to visit his grave and stuff, she’s just such a fangirl for him, she loves his whole vibe. She loves the whole back-to-nature thing, and she’s like, “You know what? Inspired by Rousseau, I would like to stay up and watch the sunrise and just like experience the beauty of the world.” It’s a real, like, again, the age that she is, you know, just a girl who’s just backpacking, and she takes ayahuasca, she’s, like, going to Coachella. She’s just like, “Isn’t nature beautiful?” So, she’s like, “Let’s stay up,” she told her friends, “Let’s just stay up and watch the sunrise. That would just be like a sweet thing to do, to just be in nature.” 

So, in the gardens behind the palace, she had her ladies-in-waiting with her. She had other, like, chaperones with her; there’s lots of people there to monitor this. I mention that because shortly after, one of the first really anti-Marie Antoinette pamphlets that came out was claiming that this had been an orgy and everybody, they were all just, like, having sex in the bushes together. So, this was the first really major anti-Marie Antoinette pamphlet. I do want to mention that there’s going to be a lot of anti-Marie Antoinette pamphlets coming up in this episode, and these were not just, like, a thing that people in Paris were like, “Oh, I feel like this, let’s just write this.” These were being paid for by Hater Nation. There is a Hateration in this dancery, and it is being paid for literally by people like Ryan Phillippe, Berry’s aunts, Berry’s brothers, Berry’s brother’s wives. People very close to her really wanted her to be hated for their own reasons because that would give, they hoped, themselves more power. 

And remember, she still hadn’t had a child. This marriage is not consummated yet. So, as long as the marriage is not consummated, what Hater Nation wanted was for her to be sent back to Vienna. They’re just like, “She’s this evil German person. We hate Austrians, and we just want to get rid of her. So, if we make her reputation as terrible as possible, maybe she’ll be kicked out.” But what they didn’t think about is that Berry was a man of habits and consistency, and he had come to really depend on Marie Antoinette. He was never going to kick her out, no matter how bad her reputation got. But Hater Nation was still trying their best. Anyway, this staying up to watch the sunrise… It’s a sequence, if you watch the Sofia Coppola movie, which I haven’t rewatched in a bit, but I do remember that that’s a scene in the movie, just this beautiful, just like watching the sun and having a nice time. That’s what she’s into at this point. She’s getting into sort of, like, a back-to-nature, clean girl sort of like, if we’re looking at Taylor Swift eras, she’s in sort of an Evermore, Folklore type moment, like a nap dress moment is coming. 

At the moment, though, poufs are still it. Everyone’s still doing poufs. At this point, feathers…. So, you’ve got, like, your three-foot-tall pouf and then you put a three-foot ostrich feather on top of it. Some descriptions of people wearing poufs are that it’s kind of like the face is halfway in the middle. It’s like, there’s the face and there’s the whole body, and then the pouf is an equivalent height of the entire body of the person. It’s getting… The same way fashion is now, it gets to one extreme and then it switches to the other extreme. It’s like, oh my god, now we’re like, low rise, cannot ultra low rise, and then suddenly it’s super high waisted jeans. So, the poufs could not be bigger and her fashions, both the poufs and also the dresses that Rose Bertin is designing for her, and just bear in mind, like her outfits every day. It’s not just like, “Oh, this is my casual dress,” like every day for her, because she was the queen, was not just like a celebrity going on a red carpet, it’s like the Met Gala. Every outfit is extreme and very complicated, and a real statement. People are so interested because she wore a different dress every day. There was so much interest in what she’s wearing because she was so public-facing. There had never been a queen of France who was just walking around people being seen so often. People were so interested in what she was wearing, what she’s doing, and they all wanted to copy it. 

So, this inspired an increase in French fashion almanacs, which are sort of the precursor to like, Vogue magazine or something. It’s just books with pictures of outfits. So, if you’re a dressmaker not in Paris, maybe you’re in Lyon or you’re a Nice, like you could get this almanac to be like, “Oh, this is what they’re wearing in Paris. Great. I will make these dresses.” Aristocratic ladies would look at the almanacs and be like, “Oooh, that’s what they’re wearing. I want to wear those dresses.” And the drawings, like the faces of all the people in these almanacs, looked a lot like Marie Antoinette, who we talked about last time, has this really distinctive profile. She has this long nose, she has this pouty lower lip; she is distinctive looking. And she’s, at this point, still being popularly celebrated for her fashion. These almanacs, like, these were expensive things, only rich people, rich women could get their hands on them. But then, poor people were able to get, like, pirated versions of them or just copies of some of the pages or something. 

So, the drawings of these outfits were just going everywhere. This is kind of the invention of our current fashion cycle, the current influencer cycle. This is the first time that what one woman was wearing was so powerful and was copied so much, and was discussed so much. She had really made fashion not her hobby, but like, her main job. She was introducing a new fashion almost every day. I said she’s kind of the first queen to be like this, but Louis XIV had kind of been like this, her ancestor, the Sun King, this very successful French King, he had also favoured maximalist outfits; a new outfit every day, he wore huge wigs. At one point, he had on call 40 wig makers. I don’t know how many wig makers Marie Antoinette had; I think she got them all from Leo and Rose Bertin, and I’m sure they had a lot of people on staff. But what she was doing was not unprecedented in terms of French royals, it was unprecedented in terms of French royal women, especially French royal wives. 

You listened to the episode last week, I presume, but just to recap what we said there a bit is that there used to be, until this couple, there’s the French king, there’s the queen, and then the King had a mistress, and the mistress was the fashion person. The Queen was just kind of like, no one ever really saw her much. She would just kind of like be like, “Look, I had a new baby. Okay, bye!” She would just kind of hang out and be with the children and, like, overseeing their education and stuff. The mistresses were the ones who were, like, coming to parties and wearing outfits and setting the trends and really showing, like, “Look how much money the King has spent on me.” So, this was the first time a queen had ever really done this, had ever been this, like, fashion girly. 

Also bear in mind, at this point, Marie Antoinette and Berry had still not yet consummated their marriage. He also, as much as some of Hater Nation thought she was this Austrian spy who was influencing him with her shadow cabinet, they thought that her and Rose Bertin were, like, a secret, women’s second government who are actually in charge of everything. Berry didn’t listen to her advice about politics. Remember, he’d had that tutor who was like, “Austrian women, don’t trust them, they’re all bitches.” So, Berry didn’t listen to her about that. He liked having her around for, like, emotional support, but he was not… They were not having sex, they were not becoming parents, she was not influencing his politics. And she knew, she knew that Hater Nation’s goal was to, like, have her exiled from the kingdom. So, she had to be like, “I need to present myself as more powerful than I am.” So, she was presenting herself with the poufs and with the big dresses as literally larger than life. This gave the impression that she was much more powerful than she really was, and it kind of, in a way, made her more powerful because people thought that she was. By showing that she had enough money to get these outfits and to get the poufs, it showed that Berry was willing to spend all this money on her, the way that other kings had spent so much money on mistresses. And it’s like, “Well, why would he spend so much money on her if he didn’t really value her and her judgment?” 

So, again, it’s sort of like, I read a bunch of different biographies, and people have different takes on this. This point of view was really from Caroline Weber in her book, Queen of Fashion, and it vibes with me, it makes sense to me. Marie Antoinette, there are people who are like, “Oh, she’s so frivolous. All she cares about is fashion and these outfits.” But what Caroline Weber advocates in her book is that Marie Antoinette was so powerless. Like, if she had children, then she would be the mother of the next king, or she would have a role that people understood. But because they hadn’t consummated their marriage— And maybe, I don’t know if things would have been different if they had consummated the marriage, and it turns out that they were infertile as a couple, but that wasn’t the situation. She had to make herself look powerful somehow. And she became so powerful by just, kind of like, being out among the public and also setting these fashion trends. I will say that setting the fashion trends were also beneficial for the economy of France because so many women wanted to dress like her, so they were buying more dresses, and they were importing more silk, and that’s supporting the silk industry in France. So, there’s influence to what she’s doing. She’s not just being silly. Like, there’s intent behind this, and it’s protecting her role as queen, which she knows is under threat from kind of everyone at Versailles. 

So, unlike other queens, other previous monarchs… Usually, the queen has her dressmaker and her hair person, it’s like, they were exclusively only for her. Nobody else could use their services, but she was like, “No, I want Rose and Leo to keep taking other clients,” because she knew that by doing this, she didn’t want them to be with her only because then how would they stay abreast on the other trends? How could Marie Antoinette be on top of, like, the trends and what people were doing? The same now, you know, the fashions that you see, like street fashion, influences high fashion. People are always trying to see like, “Well, what are the cool, young people doing in these certain neighbourhoods?” She’s like, “No, I need Rose and Leo to be like, with ear to the streets, seeing what’s happening so I can know about all the trends.” And that would mean that her outfits would never be passe, they would never be, she would never get stale. 

This was beneficial to Rose and Leo because if you were the people who were making the outfits for Marie Antoinette, the most influential fashion girly, everybody wants to come to them and have them do their hair, and make their poufs, and get their dresses from them. Rose Bertin also was allowed to sell knockoffs of Marie Antoinette’s own outfit, so she was like SHEIN of the era. She would make, like, a beautiful, extremely expensive, wild, like Lady Gaga, Chappell Roan outfit. And then two weeks later, it had to be at least two weeks later, she would then have like a cheaper knockoff version that other people could get so they could dress like Marie Antoinette. So, it’s like buying the outfit from the same person that made Marie Antoinette’s outfit. And that was the rule that Marie Antoinette had implemented with her. She’s like, “You can’t sell the knockoffs until at least two weeks after I wore it.” So, she has to have two weeks of being like, “I am inventing this trend,” and after two weeks, other people can get it. But that’s how quickly the styles and the fashions were changing that she was implementing. 

Meanwhile, zooming out from Marie Antoinette and what’s she up to, France, the country, is hugely in debt, and lots of people are starving. So, the country is hugely in debt, and one of the reasons that they were having trouble paying off their debt is that the nobility and the clergy were exempt from paying taxes. The only people who paid taxes were, like, the third estate, which is everybody else. So, like, middley-class people, working-class people, poor people were the only people paying taxes. So, to pay off this debt, their taxes kept increasing, versus just implementing taxes for the rich people, which is similar to conversations happening today. So, the poor people were getting even more poor because their tax bills were increasing to try and pay off the national debt. 

And then… The year that Marie Antoinette and Berry became king and queen, 1774, that’s when the Golf King died, there had been a really harsh, snowy winter, which led to a grain shortage, which led to an era or an event called the Flour Wars. Not flower like you wear in your hair, but flour like you cook with. The Flour Wars; people were starving because there was a grain shortage, because the crops had been bad, and bread is really important to people in France, as we’ve talked about in previous episodes. If you’re poor, like, this is your only source of sustenance. So, the Flour Wars. 5,000 people came to Versailles— Remember, like, it took Marie Antoinette, what, an hour or two in a carriage to get there? So, people came from Paris to Versailles, 5,000 of them, they charged the gates because they believed that the royals had a secret stockpile of grain and bread, and they wanted to go and get it because they were starving and they mistrust the monarchy. Good reasons. 

What the government did in response, so again, it’s 5,000 people coming to Versailles looking for secret bread. The government responded with 25,000 troops, so 20,000 more troops than people. Many of the instigators of that Flour War were hanged, and this response was seen as overkill, literally, and people were really upset about it. It was just kind of like, “We’re poor and starving and they’re killing us?” So, people were upset about the government/the monarchy, who were very much like, hand in hand, or that’s how they were seen. And so, they met. People were mad about this, and a meeting place for these people who were mad was Ryan Phillippe’s mall, which is a place where poor people and richer people could all hang out. And Ryan Phillippe was just like, “Yes, yes!” He fueled the rage. He was like, “You’re right, they are terrible. Maybe I should be the king.” He wanted Marie Antoinette and Berry to be removed from power. So, he knew the people were talking like this at his mall, and he’s just, you know, gassing them up to be like, “You’re right! We should be mad about this.” 

So, after the Flour Wars, Marie Antoinette kept doing what she was doing, because she didn’t know that there was a vibe shift. She still came to Paris to go to parties and go shopping and hang out and have picnics, but these visits started to be seen by the people of Paris as not so much a charming, like, “Isn’t it cool to see our queen around us?” Part of the reason why they were mad was because they knew… So, her giant pouf hairstyles, which were colored gray— Like, when you think gray or white, like when you picture, at least in my head, Marie Antoinette or people from this era with these wigs on, like you picture their hair is gray or white because it’s been powdered. And the powder that they used was flour. So, when the mob was going to Versailles, like “We think they have a secret stash of flour,” they kind of did, that they used for, like, hairstyling purposes. So, people saw her in these outfits, they’re starving, and she’s, you know, her hair is colored white with flour, the grain that they need to prevent them from starving. So, you can understand why they’re a little bit mad about that. And her outfits were so whimsical; they’re just, like, silly and fun, and that’s just not reading the room. That’s not the vibe. People were like, “She should be concerned about more serious matters.” You don’t know what someone’s thinking about, but it’s like, the way that she was dressing made it seem like she was only there for a good time; she wasn’t thinking about anything serious. 

So, we need to talk about “Let them eat cake.” It is still widely believed that when Marie Antoinette heard that people were starving because there was no bread, that she said, “Oh, let them eat cake,” which is kind of an example of somebody being clueless and not really understanding that if you are too poor to get bread, you also can’t get cake. She did not say that. She did not say that! If she had said that, the haters would have written about it, but the haters didn’t write about it. So, the first time somebody reported that Marie Antoinette had said this was 50 years after she died. So, knowing how much the haters were paying attention to everything she said, if she had said that when she was alive, they would have reported it, one would think. 

Furthermore, the phrase, “Let them eat cake,” was actually, that’s how it’s translated, but in French it’s like, “Let them eat brioche.” Brioche is a really rich sort of egg bread. And that phrase, “Let them eat brioche,” was first written in a book that was written in 1765, when Marie Antoinette was nine years old and back in Austria, and no one ever thought that she would ever be the Queen of France. The book itself is The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And he just says, here’s a quote from his book, translated, “I remembered the last report of a great princess who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied, ‘Then let them eat brioche.’” So, in 1765, he’s like, “I once heard someone tell me that a princess said this.” And later on… I can see why, 50 years after she died, it would be connected because the flour in the hair, the poufs kind of look like a cake, the people were starving. They might have imagined she would say this, but just for the record, she didn’t. She didn’t say this. 

So, the vibe shift is happening, and it’s partially because of what she’s doing, which is this fashion stuff, the pouf stuff, hanging out in Paris. But it’s also the slow, insidious work of Hateration Nation and their pamphlets and their gossip. It’s all sort of coming together. Her behaviour seems to confirm what the haters have been saying all along, which is that she sucks. So, she might have been inspired by Louis XIV, the Sun King, to express the glory of the French monarchy with her outfits, to live up to the expectation of the monarchy as being this fabulous, larger-than-life thing, and that’s why you should respect them and stuff. Because of all these reasons I’ve said, largely because of Hater Nation and their pamphlets, people started to see her as like, she’s dressing this way not for the glory of the monarchy or for the glory of France, but it’s like, she’s just promoting her own beauty, this is just her own vanity. 

So, her looks started to be interpreted in this way and there’s kind of nobody around her to tell her to maybe chill out on the poufs for a minute, and this is because she had been so repressed for so long and she fired and/or cut off everybody who used to tell her what to do, like Madame Etiquette was long gone, the aunts, the Aunties, she had figured out that they were bitches and she was no longer spending time with them. Other people who were in her orbit, like Ryan Phillippe and his wife, Louise, were not going to be like, “You should maybe chill out on the poufs for a minute, society hates you,” because Ryan Phillippe wanted society to hate her because then he could maybe take over and be the king. One person who did try to intervene, to be like, “This is not going to go over well girl, maybe go and stay out of the public for a bit,” was Ambassador Mercy, you remember him, he’s still around. He was her mother’s ambassador, and he kind of was, like, the go-between between her and her mom, but she just avoided him because she knew that he would tell her things she didn’t want to hear, and that’s what she’s doing right now. 

Meanwhile, Berry is the king. He’s not doing well because he’s not suited to that job. Not everybody is. I wouldn’t be, and he was not. So, remember, he was like, weeping and praying on the floor when he found out that he was going to be the king. He’s like, “I’m not ready. I’m too young.” Both things were true. 

So, after the Golf King died, Berry was presented with his grandfather’s private papers, and he just spent all night just going through them being, like, hoping that there was a “How to be a king, for dummies” instruction or something there, because Louis XV just died suddenly. There was no secession planning, not that there had been in the first place, because he was just playing golf all the time. Anyway, so what Berry found among these papers was, like, a 10-year-old document, an already out-of-date document, that was recommending candidates for who should be the chief minister, who would be kind of the person who is in charge of things, just second to the king. This list was already 10 years out of date; it’s not a good list, but this is the only list he could find. So, he’s like, “I guess I’ll just do what this list says?” 

He also found among these papers, and this is so sad, he found secret letters that his younger brothers, Provence and Artois, had written to the Golf King saying like, “Please for the good of the monarchy, could you write Berry out of the succession and give the crown to one of us instead? We don’t think he’s up to the job,” which would be pretty devastating to read for him. Other people knew that he was not up to this job, like, he’d not been trained for this job. He didn’t have the personality traits that would be successful in this job. All he was, like, the oldest surviving son of his father. He was an indecisive person, he got easily overwhelmed, he couldn’t make decisions quickly. Just the things that you need in a king in general were not strengths that he had, and what you need in a king in a country that’s in massive debt and in various wars, and the population wants to revolt against you, he super didn’t have those qualities. But he’s like, “Well, this is my job.” The one quality he had was taking it all very seriously. 

But yeah, so many people knew he wasn’t up to this job. Ambassador Mercy even wrote to Maria Theresa that Marie Antoinette should assume the authority that Berry will never exercise because at least she can make decisions, at least she is not paralyzed with indecision and procrastination all the time. He further wrote, Mercy, “It would be the greatest danger to the state and also to the whole system of government if the power were assumed by Berry.” So, lots of people knew this wasn’t the move, but this was the law. He was the oldest son, and he wasn’t going to step down because he was a person who did what he was told. So, he is the king now, and he’s just like, “I’m going to work on this and I’m going to get good at this.” 

So, yeah, after consulting this, like, out-of-date, 10-year-old list, he’s like, “Okay! Well, I’ll do what this list says, and as my chief minister, I’m going to choose this one person.” And already he’s like, the first decision he was going to make his king, his aunts who he still trusted, even though Marie Antoinette didn’t anymore, the aunts heard who he chose and they’re just like, “Oh, no, no, no, you should choose this other person instead,” and he’s like, “Okay, I’ll do what you said.” He was so indecisive, it was easy to manipulate him if you were a decisive person. And so, this is how a chief minister, the person chosen, was a 73-year-old man, the Comte de Maurepas, who had been in exile for years. This made Marie Antoinette really upset, and her mom also, because Maurepas hated Austria. This was not good for her or for the Austrian alliance that she had been married to France to support. 

But again, Marie Antoinette had no political influence over Berry at all. So, she’s just like, “Fuck everything. I just need somewhere…” Like, she needed to just hear her own thoughts and like be able to vibe out and like have a little Rousseau-based nature enclave of her own. And so, she was like, “Berry, could you please give me as a gift the tiny palace of Petite Trianon so I can just like have somewhere to be by myself and just unwind, please.” Petite Trianon is a smaller castle on the grounds of Versailles. It’s got more privacy than main Versailles, and it actually just been finished being built recently ish; it had been commissioned by the Golf King, I think, I forget if it was for Madame du Barry or for Madame… I think Madame de Pompadour. Anyway, it’s just like a little castle where she’s like, “Can I just go there and be by myself and just like not have to worry about the Versailles rules? I’ll obey the Versailles rules when I’m here, but when I’m there, can I just like vibe space only?” And he was like, “Yeah, go ahead.” 

Marie Antoinette wrote about this and how happy she was about it. “I will enjoy the comforts of a private life which exists not for us unless we have the resolution to secure them for ourselves.” And she set up the whole place for just, like, the vibes here are a bit Princess Diana and a bit Meghan Markle in the sense of just, like, knowing how much people are obsessed with trying to catch you doing something that they can complain about, or to take pictures of your outfit, or whatever. It’s just like, “I’m going to have the most privacy I can possibly manage,” but in olden day style. So, what she set up was… The only people allowed at Petite Trianon were people that she permitted there. She even put up signs being like, “Everything is by order of the Queen,” which was not anything anyone had ever done before, not just the signs, but the fact that, like, she was in charge. And Berry was like, “Yeah, babe. Go for it. You are in charge, like whatever you want there.” It’s like her man cave, but woman. The whole place was so private. She had these things set up, like, there was blinds on all the windows, so when you closed the blinds and the blinds had mirrors on the outside, so if people were trying to go there and sneak and even see what was happening inside, they couldn’t see in, all they could see was their own dumb reflections. 

So, at Petite Trianon—it’s very Rousseauian, actually—she’s like, “Here, everyone’s treated the same. When I come in, even though I’m the Queen, you don’t have to stand.” Like, when Berry comes to visit, he’s just like anyone else, let’s just all treat each other just all the same when we’re in Petite Trianon. She also did a lot of renovations inside. She sort of pivoted from her poufs and the dresses and that hyper-fixation into interior decorating, which she got really into, which is, in this situation, as I’ve described it, I think a positive thing that her expensive hobbies are not anything that anyone has to see or know about, so they maybe won’t be as mad at her about it. Versailles was open to the public, like anybody could show up there and hang out whenever they wanted, but Petite Trianon, you could only go if Marie Antoinette had invited you. This really bothered a lot of the members of Hater Nation because, as much as they hated her, they knew that she was the Queen, and they wanted to be able to be in her presence because that gave them prestige. So, the fact that they weren’t allowed in made them even more upset. And she’s just like, “Not my problem, sounds like a you problem.” 

And so, she just hung out at Petite Trianon, this castle, with her besties, Gabrielle and Princess Lamballe and some other pals that she liked who were just like a nice time. A lot of her friends, like Princess Lamballe, were from other countries. People who were from France and had grown up in France were just really indoctrinated with this, “This is the Versailles way. We have to do it this way,” so she liked hanging with people from other countries. She got really into gambling and playing cards. There’s one time when she had, like, a card-playing party that went on for 36 hours or something; people just kind of stopped for naps and kept playing cards. Like again, if we’re looking at her age, she’s in her early twenties, this very much feels like a college, a young woman in college, the activities that she’s doing. She got really into betting on horse racing. England was trendy at the time, and English horse racing became a thing she was into. 

In the wintertime, remember she grew up in Vienna, and she was always really like, she had such a nice time in winter, tobogganing and having hot chocolate with her family, so whenever it snowed, and this is very relatable to me, as somebody who grew up on the east coast of Canada. It was always exciting, the first snow of the year for me as a kid was just like, “Oh my god, snow! Maybe school’s going to be cancelled, we can go build a snowman, like have so much fun!” Whenever it snows, where I live now in central Canada, or the Prairies region, as it’s called, it doesn’t snow here as much, but when it does, I’m just like, I’m taken back to my childhood. And she is too. Whenever it snowed, she was just like, “Let’s do all the fun things I did when I was a kid!” Like the previous time in her life that she was happy. So, she and her besties, Princess Lamballe and Gabrielle Polignac, would go for sleigh rides. They’d wrapped themselves in fur and just, like, ride around, they’d go down to Paris and just the bells on their horses were ringing and it’s just like every Christmas song, you know, and they’re just having the nicest time in the world driving their sleighs past the city’s, you know, starving poor inhabitants who can’t afford bread. Not a great look as well. 

A person who saw that this was not winning her any new fans and was in fact getting her some new haters, was Ambassador Mercy. He wasn’t able to stop her because she wasn’t, you know, talking to him, but he wrote letters to her mom, being like, “Euugh, so she’s doing this now. Euugh, what should I do?” Here’s a letter he wrote in 1775, this is a year into her reign as Queen. He wrote: 

Her Majesty went to see a horse race that has been held near Paris. Crowds of people flocked to this poor spectacle, but the Queen was not welcomed with the customary signs of joy and applause. The public sees that the Queen is thinking only of amusements. These amusements also included at Versailles.

So, the same way as she had, like, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges come in and give concerts, she also had masked balls twice a week. Each masked ball had a theme, and the themes are sort of like prom themes. One of the themes was like, Norwegians! And everyone came dressed like they were from Norway. One of the themes is like: Dress like you’re from the Renaissance times. And this was interesting because Berry would sometimes come to the parties, not always, you know, he’s an introvert, but he did come to that party. He liked history; history was a big interest for him, and he came dressed as the previous French King, Henry IV. And she came dressed not as Henry IV’s wife, but as his powerful mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, which is interesting because again, just to reinforce, their marriage is still not consummated, but she’s presenting herself not as a Queen, but as a mistress, which is because the role she’d invented for herself was this kind of mistress/queen thing, but mistresses were known for being more politically influential than queens. She was not politically influential, but she wanted people to think that. I’m not making that up because she herself wrote, “I allow the public to believe that I have more credit with Berry than I do in reality, because if people were not to believe me on this point, I would have less power still.” So, she’s presenting herself as having power because she has no power, and what else can she do? 

So, in Versailles before, when the Golf King had been in charge, the whole family had to have supper at this table, like at a wedding reception where they’re all facing out and then, like, people from Paris could just come and watch them because Versailles was open to the public. Instead of that, she was like, “What if I have small intimate family dinners with just people who I want to be around, and no one watches? How about that?” So, she would have the dinners with herself, Berry, Berry’s brothers and their wives. Aunties, not invited. And so, out of all these people at this dinner, out of her family members or Berry’s family members, the person she got along best with was his younger brother, Artois, who of the three brothers—there’s Berry, there’s Provence, there’s Artois—Artois is the one that most people thought would probably be the most fitted or suited to being king. He’s kind of charming and quick-witted, decisive, handsome. So, she got along with him pretty well, although his wife was a member of Hater Nation. 

She wanted privacy because she was tired of having everything she ever did be watched. And she went from having everything she did be watched to, like, so little, to cutting herself off so much by being in Petite Trianon, or by having these private dinners. People started seeing this secrecy as sort of like, “Then she must have something to hide.” So, there were rumours that at Petite Trianon, you know, that all that was happening there was orgies with all different sexes of people. There were rumours that she and Artois were having a sexual affair because it was seen that the two of them got along and they liked to spend time together. There were rumours that she and her besties, Lamballe and Gabrielle, were lesbians. There were rumours that she was lesbian lovers with Rose Bertin. 

So, the rumours, they’re growing. The anti-Marie Antoinette Hater Nation, there’s more members joining, and the people funding these pamphlets, remember, are Ryan Phillippe, the Aunts, Berry’s brothers and their wives. They’re funding the pamphlets, and the pamphlets are going up, but they’re landing because some of the stuff just like feels true. People wanted to hate her, and the pamphlets were, part of where they were so successful, is they were consistent in their attacks. Like, they kept attacking the same things. We see this literally today with so many hate campaigns about so many people, Amber Heard, Blake Lively, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris. Just by repeating the thing enough times, it just starts to feel true, and then people think it is true, and it’s so hard, impossible really, once people feel that something is true, you can’t convince them it’s not true using logic, because they feel it’s true, they just somehow sense it. 

So, the techniques they’re using was just the repetition of the same things, like she’s Austrian, she can’t be trusted, she’s vain, she’s a shopaholic, she’s a spy, she’s a nymphomaniac, she’s a lesbian, like all these things, just like the same thing. So, repetition, character assassination, and fear mongering. So, the fear mongering is being like “She’s from Austria and she’s going to try and take over our country.” And the fact that her marriage was still not consummated was also used by the haters as fuel because it’s like, how can she be a depraved nymphomaniac and not have had any children with her husband? But it’s like, “Oh, well, he’s a cuck and she’s cuckolding him and she’s having lesbian sex and that’s why she’s not having any children.” 

The goal of all the haters were, again, still just to have her sent back to Austria, just like, get her out of here. That wasn’t going to happen because Berry really liked having her around. But also, if they did, then what? Like, then there would just be a new scapegoat. Removing her from France isn’t going to make the country’s debt be paid off. It’s not going to make there suddenly be bread. But somehow, it was seen, like the same way in the United States these days, you know, some people in the United States are trying to get immigrants removed because it’s like, “Then what? Then your country’s still going to be in debt. You’re still going to be in a recession.” Once you get rid of one scapegoat, then another scapegoat has to be put in their place because that’s the whole way scapegoats work. 

Anyway, Marie Antoinette knew about these pamphlets because at first, there was that one about her watching the sunrise. Berry tried to have all those pamphlets burned or removed or, like, paying the pamphleteers to stop printing them, but there were so many that they couldn’t intervene every time. She was aware that these pamphlets were happening, but she also knew that she was innocent, and she’s like, “Well, I don’t need to fight back because what the writing is not true and it’s just pamphlets, so like, whatever.” Her vibe was kind of like “When they go low, we go high.” She also didn’t change her behaviour. Like, she knew that people were mad about what she did, but she was just like, “Sorry about it,” and just kept doing what she was doing. 

Meanwhile, she and Berry were just like, “Let’s have some fertility doctor appointments. Like, why can’t we consummate our marriage? Is there a physiological problem with one of our bodies or something?” And so, they were both examined and their bodies seem to be in, like, good working order. Again, it’s not that there’s a sterility issue or a fertility issue; it’s just they literally had not had penetrative sex with each other in the… How long is this at this point? Like, five years of their marriage, and so the doctors were like, “What? Why? What’s going on with you?” One doctor suggested that there was maybe this physiological thing with Berry’s penis where, like, he physically couldn’t insert his penis into a vagina. And the doctors were like, and I think the cure for this would be to give you an un-anesthetized circumcision. And Berry’s like, “Rather not, rather not do that.” And so, everyone’s just kind of like, status quo, I guess. 

Rumours spread, like, from these doctor appointments, and I guess just from Marie Antoinette’s alleged nymphomania, that their childlessness was his fault, not her fault. So, somehow it’s like, “Oh, he’s got these sexual problems and she’s a nymphomaniac,” and that makes both of them seem kind of like monsters somehow. But then… just the haters trying just whatever it takes to make people hate her more, and they’re like, “Well, she spends so much time on her looks, on her fashion and her beauty. Why would she try so hard to make herself look beautiful if she’s not fucking someone? She must therefore have a lover!” And, like, additional new members of Hateration Nation are secret agents for Prussia and England, which were countries who would love it if the French monarchy was less powerful because these are countries who are at war with France. And then, even some enterprising pamphlet makers, they heard that Berry had paid off that other guy to stop printing the pamphlet. They’re like, “Oh, if we just print stuff that’s like unflattering about the Queen, maybe we will also make money by being paid off.” So, people are just doing it purely for financial gain. 

It’s similar to, I keep bringing this up, but it’s like such a modern-day similar equivalency, like clickbait headlines about, I don’t know, Sydney Sweeney or about Meghan Markle. Like, people know that those articles are going to get clicks, and that is how media sources get money. So, it’s like, the more monstrous you make somebody seem, the more people are either going to read it and believe it, or people are going to read it and get mad about it, but either way, they’re talking about your pamphlet and that’s making you some money. So, there’s big money in being a hater at this point. 

The haters that started this, like the Aunts, Ryan Phillippe, like funding people, but this was now taking on a life of its own. They didn’t even have to fund all of them anymore. A lot of people had realized that hating Marie Antoinette was a lucrative industry to be a part of. And the next sort of fashion-based thing that happens is that… So, the whole thing with Marie Antoinette and how she’s dressing, and how there’s the pictures in the almanacs, and how rich people got the almanacs and poor people got, like, pirated photocopies of the Almanacs. Rose Bertin and Leo both still had clients who were actresses and people from different social strata. But everybody wanted to dress like Marie Antoinette, and everybody was dressing like Marie Antoinette to the point that it was difficult when you saw somebody, you’re like, “Is this a wealthy noble woman? Or is this an actress/sex worker?” They all, allegedly, they were all dressing the same, they all kind of looked the same. 

And there’s a thing called, I think it’s called the sumptuary laws, which were laws at this time that were like, “If you’re wealthy, you have to dress wealthy, and if you’re poor, you have to dress poor. And if you’re a man, you have to dress like a man. If you’re a woman, you have to dress like a woman.” You have to dress like who you are in society, and if you don’t, that’s against the law. So, what Marie Antoinette was sort of— And it is kind of Rousseauian, I guess, just to be like, well, everyone should just be treated the same and everyone’s dressing the same, and this is horrifying to people like the Aunties and other people to whom class division and stuff, like, separation is so important. The vibe here is very big, “Herman, my pills!” if you know what I mean by that. 

So, the lines were just blurring between the queen and the whores, and people already thought the queen was a whore. So, now it started, the rumours started being like, is Marie Antoinette literally doing sex work? There was actually a portrait that Marie Antoinette had done of herself where she’s like really dressed up, really fancy, and she sent it to her mother to be like, “Hey Mom, here’s a picture of me.” And Maria Theresa was just like, “I can’t tell, is this a queen or is this an actress? Like, you look so trashy.” Marie Antoinette was just like, “Fuck you, mom!” and just started wearing even taller, more extreme poufs in retaliation, which is kind of where I see, like, the JoJo Siwa as well. It’s just like, “Don’t tell me what to do! I’m 22!”

 So, the line between sex workers and Marie Antoinette is also blurring because she went to the Paris Opera so much in the Ryan Phillippe mall and actresses performed at the Paris Opera. So, she’s often in the audience, the actresses were on stage. She would go to these balls, like I said, wearing a mask sometimes. So, she was, like, fraternizing with sex workers and their clients. Sex workers were also, like, off working in the mall area. This was all shocking to people that she went to the balls in the first place because royals and non-royals were not supposed to mingle. This is also like Princess Diana, she used to, at least once, went in disguise with her friend, Freddie Mercury, to just go dancing at a nightclub like a normal person. 

So, like, all the rules of society that so many people felt so strongly about were being challenged, and this is not Marie Antoinette herself directly advocating for change to society. She’s just like, she’s always sort of like on the cusp of where society was going anyway. She sort of represented this dangerous new thing of like, you know, now people are like, “You can’t tell who’s a man, who’s a woman or whatever.” In the 1960s, it was like “Everyone has long hair, like who is who?” Like, this was just an era where lines were blurring, and Marie Antoinette was part of that. I don’t think she caused it, but she was the most famous person doing it, and because she was the queen, she kind of became sort of like the face of cultural change and also, because she was a childless woman, that was sort of seen as these kind of Rousseau ideals are like, “There should be a man and a wife and the wife should stay home and watch the children,” and she’s just this single, like, Carrie Bradshaw, like Sex and the City era, not And Just Like That… era, just like going out and dancing and having a nice time, and it’s just like, “What is this? Women shouldn’t be doing this.” 

One of the other reasons why Marie Antoinette started being widely believed to be literally a whore is because Berry was not often with her when she went out in public because he liked to stay home with his lathe and do his, like, locksmithing work. He was being the king, and he didn’t like crowds; he got easily overwhelmed. So, the fact that she was out by herself also made it seem kind of like… If she was with her husband, maybe people would be less judgmental, but she was by herself, or with her ladies, or with her male friends, and that’s where everyone’s like, “Oh, I guess she’s fucking everybody.” 

I just want to throw this in here as well. I’ve mentioned before in one of the, I think last week’s episode. I would love it—this is not an expectation, but if someone is doing this anyway, please let me know—how many past episode people are mentioned in these Marie Antoinette episodes, because she overlaps with so many people. And she’s about to overlap with another one, which is the Chevalière d’Éon, who is a beloved, iconic figure on this podcast. The genderqueer soldier/fencer, I did an episode about her; you can find that if you scroll through Vulgar History and your podcast app. 

So, the Chevalière d’Éon, I can’t describe their whole deal in just a few minutes in a Marie Antoinette episode. Basically, just know this is a gender bending person; this is a person who lives sometimes as a man and sometimes as a woman. And this was the era, like around 1775, 1776, when Chevalière d’Éon had just returned to Versailles for the first time to live as a woman. And actually, Marie Antoinette was just like, “I love this. I love your vibe. I love gender bending.” Like, she herself, I remember Marie Antoinette wore pants. People were like “Ahhh, pants! What’s a man? What’s a woman?” So, she was just excited to meet Chevalière d’Éon. She got Rose Bertin on hand. Rose Bertin was seen having dinner with Chevalière d’Éon. Rose Bertin made an outfit for Chevalière d’Éon for her grand debut as a woman at Versailles, which also led to rumours that Marie Ant— Because of the gender bending of it all, that Rose Bertin was seen with Chevalière d’Éon, Rose Bertin spent so much time with Marie Antoinette, it’s just like, “They’re all lesbians!” People didn’t know what they were talking about, but they all knew they were suspicious and worried about it. Marie Antoinette found d’Éon delightful. She publicly praised her as what she phrased as “The female knight commander of my regiment of white skirts,” which was her just kind of being like, I don’t know, she was not literally saying like “d’Éon, please be the commander of an army of women,” but Hater Nation was like, “She said there’s an army of women! They’re all lesbians!” Whatever. People just like to hate. 

Which brings us to 1777. Over in America, revolutionary things are happening. People in France were really hype about it. So, they had been, like, English horse racing was really trendy, now, like, American patriotism is really trendy in France. So, 1776 America, there was the Declaration of Independence, which is around the same time the Americans sent Benjamin Franklin to Paris to try and convince the French government/monarchy to support their side of the American Revolution, the like, American side. This was the era when Lafayette, the Marquis de Lafayette, who we did an episode about, you can scroll back and find and mark it on your little sheets as well. Lafayette wanted to go to America and fight, and then snuck off to do so anyway. 

All this is happening, we’re three years into the reign of Berry and Marie Antoinette, and Maria Theresa, over in the Holy Roman Empire/Austria, so she’s co-emperor with her son, Joseph, who’s Marie Antoinette’s brother. And she’s like, “Joseph, why don’t you just go to Versailles and see what the fuck is Marie Antoinette doing? Literally, what the fuck is happening over there? What is she doing with these poufs, with the pants? Why isn’t she pregnant yet?” So, they’d been king and queen for three years, Berry and Marie Antoinette; they’d been married for seven years. They’re both… So, let me see… She’s 21, he’s 22. Yeah, so Joseph was sent there basically to do an intervention. And he’s kind of one of maybe the only person who can because Marie Antoinette didn’t have to listen to anybody else because she was queen. Berry didn’t have to listen to anybody else because he was king. But Joseph is, like, the Holy Roman Emperor, so that’s the one person at their level who they have to listen to. 

So, he, because there’s just not enough whimsy in this story, Joseph arrives in Versailles. He likes to travel, badly. So, he is like, “Hello, I’m an ordinary citizen named Count Falkenstein.” Everyone’s like, “You’re clearly Joseph the Holy Roman Emperor.” But he’s like, “No, I’m Count Falkenstein.” I love this detail. Anyway, he showed up and, say what you will about him as emperor—and I did in the Marie Antoinette episode, he was bad at it—he pretty quickly figured out what was going on and was like, “Here’s what’s going on.” He just met everybody and was like, “Oh, okay.” So, Joseph figured out what’s going on. Who’s doing what? He’s like, “Oh, the Aunties? They’re bitches. Ryan Phillippe? He sucks.” He’s just kind of… Okay, in terms of like, who has the qualities to be the leader of a major nation state, he’s got more emotional intelligence than Berry, I would say. So, he was just like, “Okay, got it. I see why these two haven’t consummated their marriage. It’s because Berry is weak-minded and an idiot,” is what he wrote to Maria Theresa. He’s like, “Got it. He’s an idiot. Let’s figure this out.” 

So, he stayed in Versailles for six weeks, during which time he was able to have a conversation with Berry where they just spoke very frankly about the birds and the bees. Joseph was also like a scientific-minded person, like Berry was, so he was able to explain things in a way that Berry could understand. And I’ll just let you know what’s been going on if you’ve been wondering. So, Berry and Marie Antoinette were not having intercourse in a procreatively useful way. At first, they didn’t know what to do at all, or they were too shy, or too embarrassed or something. What they had been doing for several years, when they did happen to try to have sex, is that Berry would have an erection, he would insert his erect penis into Marie Antoinette, keep it there, neither of them moving, and then he would remove the penis and then go into another room, and then that’s where he would come. So, Joseph is like, “Oh, okay! Well, here’s what I recommend. When you put the penis and move around a little bit, and keep moving around until you come inside of her.” And Berry’s like, “Oh wow! No one ever told me that. I’ll try that. Thank you so much.” 

So, August 30, 1777, seven years into their marriage, Marie Antoinette wrote to her mother, “This is the happiest moment. It has been eight days now since my marriage has been consummated. The test has been repeated yesterday, even more completely than the first time.” And within a year of this intervention, Marie Antoinette was pregnant! 

Her pregnancy announcement, I don’t know if she’s into poufs at this time or not, but anyway, the pregnancy announcement almost simultaneously to the news that France officially recognized America as its own country, separate from Great Britain. So, again, American Revolution, really trendy in Paris and at Versailles. Marie Antoinette was just, like, everyone’s hype about it because it means it was a loss for Britain, and Britain had been enemies for a long time, even though English horse racing had been popular there for a minute. So, Marie Antoinette invited Benjamin Franklin to one of her card parties and invited him to stand behind her chair, which was a great honour. I don’t know if that meant he would, like, look at the cards she had. Anyway, that was an honour that he was granted. She hosted a ball in February 1778 to celebrate the new allies, France’s new ally, America, which included what I have to assume was an incredibly culturally insensitive performance of dancers dressed up as “Native Americans.” She also, oh no, she is in her pouf era still. She got Leo and Rose to construct her a pouf, which contained a replica of a French naval vessel, like a navy ship. And then, the large model was hoisted atop her pouf as evidence of her patriotism, of just, like, France and America, BFFs forever. 

And then Frederick the Great, who we talked about in the Maria Theresa episode a lot, an enemy. He ruined the party, yet again, in his usual way by mobilizing the army and preparing to invade Bohemia, which is one of the territories of Marie Antoinette’s mother, Maria Theresa. So, Maria Theresa was terrified about what would happen, and so she bombarded Marie Antoinette and Ambassador Mercy with letters saying like, “Marie Antoinette, please use your influence with the king to convince the French to support Austria in this, to get France to send money and troops to help Joseph.” Marie Antoinette did what she could. She’s just like, she’s like a sleeper cell, and she’s been activated, which is like what the haters had thought all along that she was secretly there to work for Austria. She’s really there to work for the Austria-France alliance, which is what her mother was asking her to do. 

But if you will recall, the chief minister was this guy called Maurepas, and he hated the Austrians, and so he warned Berry, like, “Don’t listen to Marie Antoinette, she’s probably going to tell you to try to help out Austria,” and so Berry did not help out Austria, which is when Marie Antoinette suddenly realized that the whole purpose of her, well, two purposes to her coming to France in the first place. Firstly, is to be the mother of children who would inherit the French throne next, that would cement the alliance between Austria and France. But more importantly, to ensure that Austria and France stay helping out each other. This was the cornerstone of her family’s foreign policy. She had been sent to Versailles specifically to nurture and protect this, and clearly, this alliance was over in all but name, and this was maybe, kind of her fault. Was it kind of? It was a lot of people’s fault. I would blame Maurepas a lot. I would blame the people who didn’t train her how to do this well. I would blame the people who didn’t explain to Berry how to be a king. I would blame the Golf King for not updating his letter of who you should choose as your minister. Lots of people to blame here. 

Anyway, Marie Antoinette felt badly about this personally. She was really upset about it. Mercy wrote: 

I’ve never seen her so depressed. In an outpouring of confidence, she said she wished to make a general confession. She spoke of her amusements, her society, and all the details of her personal life. She added that her deep trouble of being unable to convince Berry to help her brother had led her to think seriously of the life that lay before her. 

So, she had a real… You know, she’s just been in this JoJo Siwa era, this Miley Cyrus Bangerz era, and then she’s just like, “Maybe it’s time to grow up a little bit and stop just being nonstop party girl all the time.” And as she’s going through this crisis and thinking like, “Who am I? Who am I?” like in Zoolander, she found a new confidante and a person that helped her kind of with these existential issues, and it is a really hot guy named Count Axel von Fersen from Sweden. 

So, he’d come to Versailles at around the same time as well, 1778. He was born in Sweden to a high-ranking and well-connected family. He was the same age as Marie Antoinette, like, early twenties. He was tall, slender, handsome, athletic and charming. The vibe is Alexander Skarsgård or any Skarsgård. He was just a hottie. He was a hunk. He was a captain in the Swedish cavalry. And like Lafayette, he was really inspired by what was happening in America, and he wanted to get permission to go and help fight with, you know, George Washington et al in America. And so, he wanted to, because France, like Sweden, wasn’t involved in the American Revolution, I don’t think. So, Axel von Fersen wanted to go to France to volunteer to join the French army to go help in America. This is why he wound up in France, and he was formally presented at Versailles. And Marie Antoinette was like, “I remember this hot guy. I met him when he was travelling around Paris a few years ago.” So, she saw him, Axel von Fersen, and was like, “Ah! Here is an old acquaintance.” So, she’s happy to see him because he’s hot and it turns out also nice. And so, while he was waiting to get a commission in the French army, he just remained in Paris/Versailles, and Marie Antoinette invited him to Petite Trianon, he would come and play card games and stuff. 

At this time… So, some of the biographies that I read suggest that these two became lovers, but none of them suggest that they became lovers yet, because she was, if you’ll recall, very pregnant at this point. And so, it was sort of like, no one was suspicious about these two being together because she was pregnant at the time. So, I don’t know, she wasn’t seen as a sexual person for five seconds. Axel von Fersen wrote really nice things about her. In September of that year, he wrote: 

The Queen, who is the prettiest and most amiable princess that I know, has had the kindness to inquire about me often. She asked my friend why I did not go to her card parties on Sundays. 

On November 19th, he wrote:

The Queen treats me with great kindness. I often pay her my court at her card games, and each time she makes to me little speeches that are full of goodwill. As someone had told her of my Swedish uniform, she wished to see me in it. I am to go Thursday, thus dressed to the Queen’s apartments. She’s the most amiable princess that I know.

And the same as how she liked to be friends with Princesse de Lamballe, Gabrielle de Polignac, Marie Antoinette just likes a basic, nice person, and that seems like that’s what this guy is like, and he’s also hot and foreign, so he doesn’t have all the weird French baggage. 

Marie Antoinette gave birth to her child, May 20, 1778, and she had to do this Versailles style, which is just like an apartment, with everybody who was like, their family responsibility was to be in the room when the baby was born. Because it was December, all the windows were sealed shut to keep the drafts out, but that made the room so hot, and there were so many people in it that she actually fainted after giving birth, and Berry had to break open a window to get some air into the room. This child was a daughter. And if you’ll recall, Marie Antoinette’s mother, Maria Theresa, demanded that all of the first granddaughters born to her children had to be called Maria Theresa as well. So, this little girl was named Marie-Thérèse, which was not great for the hater— Well, it was great for the Hater Nation because it gave them something to complain about that this girl had been given an Austrian name. So, like, “Marie Antoinette, she’s not really French. She’s Austrian! Look, she named her daughter an Austrian thing.” 

They went to Paris for the baby’s baptism, expecting to see cheering crowds on the streets because like finally, a royal baby has been born. But instead, in a really creepy move, everyone just stood there silently, which is ominous. But they were riding through, Rose Bertin was there, standing beside the Grand Mogol, waving at the parade, and then Marie Antoinette saw her and smiled and waved back, and then the haters were just like, “What?” Because you know, it used to mean something when the queen waved to you, but how dare she wave at this fashion designer, this person who’s not an aristocrat, not a noble. People are already so mad about the whole Rose Bertin thing, like, that Rose would come to Versailles and help dress Marie Antoinette when she wasn’t like, you know, a duchess or whatever. The whole, like, blurring of lines, I don’t get it. I don’t get why it’s such a big deal because that’s not what society that I live in is like, really, in Canada, in the year 2025. But in this era, class distinctions were so crucial. I’m sure there’s places like this. I think England is like this. Anyway, people were just really upset. 

And now Marie Antoinette was in her maternity era, and she’d made a hard pivot into just mom life. She’d always loved being around kids. She had all these siblings. She had little brothers. When her courtiers had kids, she loved playing with their kids. She’s just somebody, like Caroline of Brunswick—a woman who you might have heard of, that I wrote a book about called Rebel of the Regency—Marie Antoinette was just a woman who wanted to be a mother. She dreamed of being a mother, she always wanted to be a mother, she was in this strange, like, non-sexual relationship for a long time. She finally gets to be a mother and she’s just like, okay, and so everything calms down. The outfits, the poufs, everything. She’s just like, “I’m in my clean girl era, and I’m just going to hang out with my baby at Petite Trianon and just live my Rousseau lifestyle.” 

She also started really getting into a new hobby, which was putting on plays with her friends. So, she had a small private theatre constructed at Petite Trianon. It was, I mean, I don’t know, it was a lovely place. I’m not sure if it’s still there, but she would perform in the plays herself. She, interestingly, would always like to cast herself in the lead roles or roles of women who lived without the strict expectations she had to live in. So, these were clearly the sorts of people that she liked to pretend that she could be, like a peasant or a servant girl or a shepherdess. It would be her and her friends putting on these shows. The audience was often just Berry, and he had a nice time. He’s just like, “That’s my wife. She’s having a nice time. Love this for her.” 

She caught the measles in 1779, which I mention because Berry had not had the measles, and so she had to quarantine herself. She, for the first time, spent the night at Petite Trianon. Usually, she just went out there for the day, and then she would sleep back in Versailles, but this is the first time she spent the night there. Obviously, rumours spread that she was having an orgy, hate pamphlets increased. People were really mad about it and really suspicious. Although all she was doing there was recuperating from the measles, and just like, going for a little time in her garden and spending time just chilling in the lake, like, in little boats with her friends. But people were just like, “What is she doing? Orgies?” Whatever, “Spending all the time with like Austrian spies who are going to take over France.” 

Finally, Axel von Fersen got a commission to go— Well, honestly, finally, French troops actually were given permission to actually go to America in 1780, and Axel got to go with them. She was without her hot male friend, but stayed busy in her motherhood era. And she was just like in her pregnancy time, and then, you know, her postpartum time, she wore more comfortable dresses, which makes total sense. She and her besties got into this new, sort of, hat situation called the milkmaid’s bonnet, which is kind of like big, floppy, white cloth hats with a few flowers in them. Then eventually, they kind of evolved this into wearing sort of straw hats. If you’ve seen the portrait of Marie Antoinette by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, in sort of like the white cotton dress with the straw hat, there’s also similar portraits of Princesse Lamballe and Gabrielle de Polignac dressed the same way. So, this is the new look. This is like, it’s a real, you know, like it’s going from super low-rise to super high-rise jeans. It just could not be more different from the poufs and the huge dresses and stuff. 

So, the dresses that she was wearing at this time initially were called a lévite, and these were just sort of really simple white dresses inspired by the toga-like costumes of classical French theatre, as were worn later on by a famous French actress, who I’ve talked about on this podcast, called Rachel. Anyway, maybe this has to do with the stage acting that she’s doing as well, but the lévite was the first iteration of this dress, and then later, she moved to the gaule, which was sort of like a muslin shift. It’s just like a white dress, it’s like shapeless, and you just tie a belt around the middle. It’s super comfortable. Like, if you’re just pregnant, postpartum, breastfeeding, like this is just a much more comfortable thing to wear than what the other dresses were like. Rose Bertin, of course, was the one who’s making these, and these dresses were inspired by what colonial women wore in French colonies in the Caribbean, where it was hot and where this fabric would be more sensible. 

By 1782, one third of Marie Antoinette’s wardrobe were just these loose shift dresses, and of course, everybody was wearing it because she was still, as much as some people hated her, people still looked to her for fashion advice. The boulevards of Paris in the Ryan Phillippe mall was just, like, flooded with plain, white dresses. Haters pointed out that these dresses were made out of cotton or muslin, which were not fabrics that were indigenous to France. You had to get these fabrics… Rose Bertin got hers a lot from Scotland. Anyway, the French silk manufacturing industry was like, “This is destroying our industry! Won’t anyone think of the French silk merchants?” Some silk workers in Lyon apparently lost their job because there was less enthusiasm for silk. Could possibly also be because everybody is so poor. Anyway, so she’s blamed for all of this. 

And then also there was a thing about these dresses, because they were so much easier to take on and off, it’s just like, “So, that’s how she can just have sex constantly,” was what people said as well. Anyway, the silk merchants had a slight boost in income when Maria Theresa, Marie Antoinette’s mom, died back in Vienna. So, all of Versailles went into mourning, which required a whole lot of black silk outfits. What this also meant for Marie Antoinette is that instead of her mother and her brother being co-emperors, now it’s just her brother. And her mother was always paying attention to her and doing her best, in her way, to look out for her. But her brother Joseph was not as close to her. He had done that intervention, but Marie Antoinette didn’t feel like if things went badly, that he would intervene, like maybe the mother might have. 

Anyway, she had another baby, which was a son. Very exciting because now there’s a new dauphin, there’s a new heir to the throne. He was named Louis Joseph for his dad. Remember, his dad, Berry’s real name was Louis-Auguste. Joseph was named for his godfather, Marie Antoinette’s brother, the Holy Roman Emperor, which the haters were just like, “An Austrian name, named after the Austrian emperor!” They were mad about it. Through these two pregnancies, Marie Antoinette’s hair, which as a younger girl had been like my hair, if you’re watching the video, sort of like, curly and red and kind of thick, but through the pregnancies, her hair started thinning. So, Leo, the hairstylist to the stars, invented a new, shorter hairstyle. It was a sort of boyish hairstyle that would just be more flattering to her with this hair. And people are just like, “Oh my god, she’s crossdressing! What’s she doing with her hair?” People freaked out about it. But of course, women started emulating. So, it’s like the way that people hated her but also emulated her is interesting. I don’t know what contemporary figure has both things at the same time like this, if anyone does. I don’t know. 

At around this same time, so 1783, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, she painted this famous portrait of Marie Antoinette where she’s wearing a gaule, this shapeless white dress with a sash around the waist, she’s wearing her straw hat and she’s holding a rose, and the rose is the emblem of the Habsburg dynasty where she’s from in Austria. This painting was displayed to the public at the Paris Salon, and it was so shocking, the public were horrified to see the queen… They’re like, because the shift dress, they’re like, “Well, that looks like a chemise, an undergarment. Why is the queen being portrayed in her undergarments? This is proof that she’s a whore.” Also, the fact that there’s nothing in the portrait that made it apparent that this is a portrait of a queen; there’s no crown, there’s nothing fancy about it. So, they’re just like, “Well, this is devaluing what the monarchy is. This is disrespectful,” and stuff, to the point that Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun had to remove the painting from the salon, and she made a new replacement painting of Marie Antoinette in the same pose, holding a rose, but dressed much more formally. 

People were upset about it, but Marie Antoinette was just like, the same as when her mother criticized the poufs, and she just wore bigger poufs.She knew people were mad about these dresses, and she’s just like, “I’m just going to wear even more shapeless dresses. I’m just going to wear even more straw hats.” And apparently, her daughter, Marie-Thérèse, she’s sometimes called by the nickname Mousseline, which is the French word for muslin, the fabric that her dresses were made from. 

Meanwhile, France, the country, still in debt because they had spent… They were already in debt, and they spent all this money to support the American Revolution. Taxes alone, taxes on the poor people, not the rich people, could not cover how big the debt was. And Maurepas, the chief minister, had said, “We can’t increase taxes anymore. People are already almost rioting, we can’t increase taxes anymore.” France had to borrow money from other countries, and this task fell to the director general of finances, Jacques Necker, father of Germaine de Staël, who we did an episode about a bit ago. 

So, Jacques Necker was just like, “How can I convince other countries to loan us money when we’re in debt?” So, he made this document that’s just kind of like, colourfully creative accounting that revealed the monarchy’s accounts to the public. It’s the first time a document like this had ever been prepared in France to show, like, what the royal family had spent on what. And so, even though the debt was like, 70 million livres, which, I don’t know how much that is now, but probably 70 trillion livres, he just, through creative accounting, he made it appear as though there was an annual surplus that could pay off the debt. This document convinced four lenders to lend France more money. Necker was proclaimed a financial genius, and then, the American Revolution was still ongoing, hadn’t ended. Like, the Declaration of Independence is 1776, and then they were fighting against the British, and the French were there now. But eight months after this financial document came out, the British surrendered at Yorktown, a turning point in the American Revolution. So, France is like, the money that they had spent on that seems to be good. Like, it seems to be well spent at this point. 

So, the war was over, America had won with France’s help. It had been a really long time since the kingdom could celebrate a military victory. They’d been at war, but they just kept losing things, and they were just especially excited that they beat Britain, their like, archrival for centuries. So, everyone is just happy, everyone’s happy in France, and so, the court, the royals, went on a spending spree. Marie Antoinette spent her money. It’s not like everyone got a gift, but just everyone’s excited. Not that they’ve been saving money, but now they feel like, “Well, now we can actually spend money again,” which they have been all along. 

She indulged her love of the simple life by building a small-scale working farm, complete with her own chickens, cows, and peasants on the grounds of Petite Trianon, so she could just kind of like have a nice time in her rustic Rousseau, little enclave, pretending that she’s a little farmer person. She loved it so much, she’s like, “I want more farm, more farmland, please.” So, she got Berry to give her enough money to purchase her own country estate. And so, her plan for this was the Château of Saint-Cloud, and I think it used to be owned by the Ryan Phillippe family. It was six miles from Versailles, so she could entertain people in even greater privacy, and her plan was that this would eventually be inherited by one of their children. This was scandalous because she owned this property herself. It wasn’t just like, a château on Versailles grounds, it’s like, she has her own house. And then people are like, “Why does the Queen need her own house? Is it so that her Austrian emperor brother can take over and that he will live there?” Like, it was just suspicious for a woman to own a house in general, let alone a foreign Queen. 

I do want to mention that other members of the family were also spending money on various things. Other people were given, like, mansions. Berry helped pay for renovations. He actually, Berry himself, like the French treasury, paid the interest on his younger brother Artois’s debts. He got money from the treasury, seven million livres, sent to his other brother, Provence, to purchase a second country estate; he already had one country estate. They also approved the building of a new port at Cherbourg on the English Channel, that cost 28 million livres. So, everyone’s spending money, but everyone’s on similar things, real estate-based things. But Marie Antoinette is the only one that people are just like, “[groans] We don’t like her having money and things.” 

This is also around the same time that her previous governess, the person taking care of the children, had to resign because of a sexy scandal that maybe I’ll talk about in a later episode. But with the job open, Marie Antoinette decided to give the job of governess to her friend Gabrielle and that had a salary of 400,000 livres annually. People were mad about that because Gabrielle was not a royal, because Gabrielle was one of her friends, and they’re like, “Oh, she just gave her that job because they’re lesbians or whatever.” People are mad. Haters are mad. 

Haters are mad about various things. But all of these things, like Gabrielle’s salary, Marie Antoinette buying the house and the hobby farm, and paying off the debts of the brother, all of these things were truly minimal compared to what the treasury had spent to help support the American Revolution. So, if you’re looking at, like, why is the country in so much debt? It’s not because Marie Antoinette got some chickens. It’s because the French cost of the war in America was $1.3 billion in olden times money. I don’t know how much that is now, $1.3 billion livres. So, this was significantly more than the cost of all the family projects combined. Marie Antoinette cutting down on the amount of dresses she bought would not have made a dent in the royal deficit, but that’s not what it looked like to the public. Sometimes when a thing looks bad, even if it isn’t bad, you can’t convince people that it isn’t bad. So, her reputation had never been worse, and now we’re in 1784 and the Affair of the Necklace. 

Now, I did a whole episode about the Affair of the Necklace in 2019, ages ago, ages ago. One of the first episodes of Vulgar History was about the Affair of the Necklace, and I’m going to re-edit that and air that two days from now, on Friday, so you can get all those details of how that happened and more details about it, because I think the context will be useful. But I’m going to go over how it affected Marie Antoinette at this point in this episode. 

So, there’s a jeweller in France named Boehmer, and he had built the shittiest, ugliest necklace in the world, it was called the Slave’s Collar. It was made of, like, 650 large diamonds that he had collected from all across Europe. He had originally envisioned that Golf King, Louis XV, would give this to his mistress, Madame du Barry, who liked shitty, tacky things. But he died before they could close the sale. But this necklace was still made, and it was still assembled. It had cost a million livres to make it, or that’s how much he wanted to sell it for. There were very few women in the world who could afford to buy this. Marie Antoinette was one of them, but she had never been a necklace girly, firstly. And secondly, she was now in her clean girl era and didn’t want a shitty necklace. Anyway, so she didn’t want this necklace. This jeweller tried to convince her to buy it, and she said no. He went to Berry and was like, “Could you buy it for her?” And he was like, “Marie Antoinette, do you want me to buy you this necklace?” She’s like, “Hell no. It’s an ugly ass necklace.” If you want to see how ugly the necklace is, it’s like tasselled, go to my Instagram, @VulgarHistoryPod, in my highlights, there’s pictures of the necklace there. Has to be seen to be believed. 

Anyway, so she doesn’t want the necklace. He kept trying to sell it to her. At one point, she said to him, “I have refused the necklace. The king wished to give it to me, and I refused it again. Don’t say anything more about it. Try to break it up and sell it, and don’t drown yourself about it.” So, she thought that this was over, the whole thing had been sorted out. But then she’s surprised to get a letter in 1784 from Boehmer saying, “Thank you so much for buying the necklace. It’s going to look so beautiful on you.” And she’s like, “What the fuck is this junk mail?” And she literally burns the letter. She’s like, “Well, he’s insane.” But she mentioned to her lady-in-waiting, like, “I just got this weird letter from him.” And so, her lady-in-waiting went to talk to Boehmer to be like, “Dude, what’s going on with this necklace?” And he was like, “No, I needed her to pay me for the necklace because I gave it to someone who said they were going to give it to Marie Antoinette, and Marie Antoinette is going to pay me for it.” And it’s like, “Bro, you’ve been scammed!” 

So, the person who he had given the necklace to, or who had helped broker this, was a guy called Cardinal de Rohan. Cardinal de Rohan is a person who Marie Antoinette had hated ever since she’d been the Dauphine. So, Cardinal de Rohan had said mean things about her mom, and so when Marie Antoinette, age 14, came to Versailles in the first place, her mother, Maria Theresa, was like, “Don’t trust this bitch. Cardinal de Rohan, he sucks.” And Marie Antoinette is like, “Got it. He sucks.” And he does! She was right. But Rohan, he sucks. You know the whole thing about watching the sunrise party? He was one of the people spreading rumours that it had been an orgy. He was a member of Hater Nation, and yet, he still wanted Marie Antoinette to be friends with him. He sucks. At one point, she was throwing an outdoor party at Petite Trianon, and he snuck in wearing a mask, but he was wearing his cardinal’s red tights, and they’re like, “Bro, you’re wearing red tights. We know you’re Cardinal Rohan.” And then he got kicked out. He sucks. 

So, Marie Antoinette was like, “That bitch is involved?” So, she went to Berry, and she’s just like, “I don’t know what Rohan is up to, but we need to clear my name because he’s up to some shit.” So, they called in Rohan to talk to him, and he was like, “Oh, yeah. No, so I did, in fact, I thought that the queen wanted me to get this necklace secretly, so I helped get it because I thought that that would make you like me.” And they’re like, “Bro, what?!” And then he’s like, “Well, you wrote me this letter.” And he showed them this letter. There was like, “Dear Rohan, please get me the necklace,” signed, “Marie Antoinette de France,” which is like, that’s not how Marie Antoinette signed her letters, and he would know that she’s had her letters, just Marie Antoinette. And they’re like, “You thought she wrote this letter? Like, this isn’t even a good forgery, bro!” So, Rohan was clearly involved in this scandal, and Marie Antoinette was just like, “This is besmirching my name, like so many things are. But also, I hate you, Rohan.” She wanted to just clear her name, that she’s like, “I’m not involved in any of this.” 

So, Berry, at this point, had no chief minister; Maurepas had died, and Berry hadn’t chosen a new one. He was like, “I’ll just be in charge by myself, it’s fine.” So, there’s no one there to be like, “Let’s just handle this privately.” So, Marie Antoinette was like, “I want this bitch to be embarrassed publicly, humiliated. I need revenge against this guy, he sucks.” And Berry’s like, “Okay.” So, Rohan is going to be officiating; he’s a cardinal, he’s a church guy, “He’ll be officiating the ceremony in the royal chapel, so we’ll get him arrested in front of everybody.” Marie Antoinette is like, “Yes, perfect. Humiliate this bitch!” So, the entire court of Versailles got to see him being arrested and dragged out of there in full ecclesiastical attire. 

He was taken to the Bastille prison, and Marie Antoinette was just like, “I want this bitch to be on trial publicly, because I need my name to be cleared and I want him to be humiliated.” Some of Berry’s ministers were like, “This is maybe a bad idea. This could maybe backfire on you and make the monarchy less popular.” But the other ministers were like, “No, this is great,” because they were Hater Nation members, and they’re like, “This is going to make Marie Antoinette look bad, which is good for us, so let’s do it.” So, it was a public trial for Rohan for the criminal theft of this necklace, and it caused a sensation. Everybody is starving. Everybody thought that Marie Antoinette is this, like, lesbian nymphomaniac. They’re all like, “Well, she probably did want the necklace, so she’s probably trying to save face.” Everyone was just kind of was on Rohan’s side because they hated Marie Antoinette so much. At this point, the optics were just bad. 

So, there’s various co-conspirators, which I talk about in the episode that you’ll hear on Friday in your podcast feed. But ultimately, what Rohan was on trial for was, did he really believe that Marie Antoinette wanted this necklace, or was he lying? So, the trial became sort of like, a referendum on, like, is it believable that Marie Antoinette would have wanted this disgusting necklace? And suddenly, everything we talked about this episode, where it’s just kind of like, all of the JoJo Siwa stuff, where it’s just like, well, why does she have secret dinners? Why does she wear this dress you can have sex in? Why does she not let anybody come to her parties? Why is she having orgies? It’s like, of course, she would want this necklace. Of course, he would think that she wanted this necklace. 

The whole blurring of queen and sex worker also came up because one detail that came out during this saga… So, the mastermind behind all of it was not Rohan; he was just the dupe. The person behind it all was this kind of badass grifter called Jeanne de la Motte, who again, we talk about on Friday, just look for that drop in your podcast feed. Jeanne de la Motte had convinced Rohan that Marie Antoinette wanted this necklace, and the reason that she sealed the deal was she hired a sex worker, whose whole thing was she looked a lot like Marie Antoinette. So, she hung out, the sex worker, I think her name was Olivia, she hung out in the Ryan Phillippe mall area and just, like, wandered around looking like Marie Antoinette and one of the white dresses, holding a rose, looking like the portrait. So, Jeanne de la Motte hired her. 

Under darkest night, remember anyone can go in Versailles, so this woman, Olivia, went into this like garden in Versailles, Jeanne de la Motte got Rohan to go there, and so Olivia had kind of like a cloak hiding her face a bit, but she was wearing the white dress, she’s holding the robe, she looks exactly like the Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun portrait. And she was like, “It’s me, Marie Antoinette. I do want you to get this necklace. Thank you.” And then she’s like, “You may kiss my dress, the hem,” and Rohan did. So, everyone’s like, “It’s believable that Marie Antoinette would have done that, that sounds like something Marie Antoinette would do, especially because we know that that dress, the gaule, is like a sex dress for nymphomaniacs.” And so, Rohan was found innocent of all charges. The lower class conspirators, Jeanne de la Motte and some others were found guilty, but Rohan was found innocent, which ultimately meant like “We, the jury believe that it’s believable that Marie Antoinette would have done this underhanded sneaky thing to get this necklace, and met him wearing a sex dress in the garden,” which was kind of like, pretty devastating to her, personally. She didn’t realize that her reputation was actually that bad. So, he was found innocent. And then Marie Antoinette was just like, “I need revenge. I need vengeance.” 

So, she got Berry to punish him anyway, by banishing him for the crime of disrespecting the sovereign. As he was, like, journeyed on his way to exile outside of France, crowds lined the streets and cheered for him because they hated Marie Antoinette and saw him as some sort of hero in this situation. And Marie Antoinette, this was a mega wake-up call for her about how much she was actually hated. Her lady-in-waiting, Madame Campan, wrote a memoir later, and she wrote, “The Queen’s grief was extreme,” like, after this verdict. “I went to her and found her alone in her closet. She was weeping. ‘Come,’ said her Majesty to me, ‘Come and lament for your Queen, insulted and sacrificed by injustice.’” 

So, this brings us to 1785 and the foreign loans. Remember, Jacques Necker was able to trick other countries into giving them loans. The foreign loans are now due, France can’t repay them, which leads France to a mammoth, full-on Great Depression-size financial crash. What happens next to Marie Antoinette? We’ll find out next week, in this ongoing saga, How Do You Solve a Problem like Marie Antoinette? 

So, this is the Vulgar History podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and we’re in Marie Antoinette Month. Oh, I actually have an update for you. So, I wrote a book. It’s called Rebel of the Regency: The Scandalous Saga of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain’s Uncrowned Queen. It is available for preorder in Canada and the U.S. from any bookstore. You can find some links to some major bookstores, like the ones that anyone can buy from in Canada and the U.S., on my website, RebelOfTheRegency.com. The update is that you can now preorder the audiobook of this book. So, if you want to listen to this book, the same way you listen to this podcast, I don’t know if I’ll be narrating it—I hope I will be, but if it’s not me, it’ll be someone great—so you can preorder the book now on Libro.fm, on Kobo, on Audible, wherever you get your audiobooks from. As well as you can order the book book from anywhere you get your books from in Canada and the U.S., and I hope, I hope soon to have news for people in other countries, if and when you’ll be able to preorder this book as well. 

When you do preorder the book, there’s a form you can fill out to get some free stuff from me. So, like, not only do you get the book when it’s published, but if you send me a copy of your receipt, you can get one year free membership to my Patreon, one year free membership to my Substack, and a Caroline of Brunswick-themed paper doll, because she was just as much of a fashion girlie as Marie Antoinette, and so I want to celebrate that about her. 

I do also want to mention that on my Patreon, you can watch videos of these episodes if you want to see my face and maybe my cat, who’s next to me, but you can’t see her. If you want to watch the videos of these episodes, you can do that if you join my Patreon for $6/month or more. You also, at that level of Patreon, you get access to our Discord server, where we just chat and have a nice time, shit talk people from history. And also at that $6/month level on the Patreon, you get access to episodes of Vulgarpiece Theatre, which is a movie podcast, which I host with my friends Allison Epstein and Lana Wood Johnson. We’re going to be, at the end of this month, at the end of September, talking about Sofia Coppola’s movie Marie Antoinette. I’m excited to watch that. I haven’t watched it since it came out, I don’t think. Now that I know who all these people are and what all these moments mean, I think it’ll be really exciting, and I’ll have fun talking about that. 

Anyway, if you want to join the Patreon, Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. Preorder of my book, wherever you get books, there’s links at RebelOfTheRegency.com. And also, if you’re looking forward to reading it, add it on Goodreads, add it on Storygraph. If you’re in NetGalley, you can request an advanced copy of it. I hope you get one. And yeah, next week, we’re going to be back with more Marie Antoinette stuff. Shit is getting real for our girl, and I’ll tell you how that all plays out next time. So, until then, keep your pants on and your tits out. 

Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Ann Foster, that’s me! Editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. Transcripts of this podcast are available at VulgarHistory.com by Aveline Malek. You can get early, ad-free episodes of Vulgar History by becoming a paid member of our Patreon for as low as one dollar a month at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWwriter. Vulgar History merchandise is available at VulgarHistory.com/Store for Americans and for everyone else at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Follow us on social media @VulgarHistoryPod and get in touch with me via email at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com. 

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